If I could travel back in time and give my younger self one crucial piece of advice, it would be to think in decades.

Not days, not weeks, not months, not years — decades.

Most of us are selling ourselves short. We’re underestimating what’s possible with a long-term time horizon. Never developing the patience required to make an impact on the world.

When I was younger, I was quietly ambitious. I had an impenetrable belief in myself and my capabilities, but I wasn’t realistic about the time commitment required to develop my potential. This is a big issue for young people raised in a culture dominated by instant gratification and viral fame.

Thinking in decades is such a crucial mindset to cultivate early in life. It helps you avoid many common traps that snap up young souls. It’s the difference between personal success and failure. The defining factor that shapes the outcome of your life.

When people fail to adopt a long-term direction, they often experience a sense of meaninglessness. They resort to destructive short-term habits to fill this void, quickly spiralling into a negative cycle. As a result, their dreams are shattered before they even have a chance to discover what they truly are.

Gathering Power vs Weight

Decisions accumulate over time. You can think of this as a gathering power or a gathering weight.

Gathering power is a steady increase in your vitality. A rolling snowball of energy that multiplies as you take positive action in the direction of your long-term vision.

Gathering weight is a build-up of sluggishness and negativity. Your emotions become darker, and your behaviour more erratic.

You can likely relate to one or both of the above. I’ve experienced them at different points in my life.

These states aren’t easy to break out of. They’re cyclical feedback loops. The more power you gather the easier it becomes to get more. The more weight you gain, the more difficult it becomes to shake it off. One of our main tasks in life is to keep ourselves in the positive cycle of gathering power while avoiding the gathering of weight at all costs.

The biggest danger of allowing yourself to gather too much weight is the potential for eruption. Sprewing negativity onto anything or anyone you encounter. Both power and weight are infectious. Your weight will drag down those around you. Your power, on the other hand, will be a positive influence on others.

Going down the route of power or weight doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a slow process, dictated by your daily decisions. Understanding this demonstrates why thinking in decades is such a valuable lesson. A long-term mindset allows us to notice whether what we’re doing in the short-term is adding power or weight.

Short-term Culture

As I mentioned, modern culture doesn’t encourage us to think in decades. It promotes the exact opposite. From the moment children become aware of their surroundings, they're bombarded with messages of temporary pleasures, while the foundational principles of work ethic, mastery, and long-term vision are nowhere to be found.

Marketing is a huge problem. Its sole purpose is essentially to convince people to take short-term action at the expense of long-term gains. It does this through messages of inferiority and false desires. The biggest industries in the world rely on convincing you that instant gratification is normal and necessary. This is how they survive.

We’ve been raised to believe that these superficial gains define our value and meaning. We’ve taken on status, image, and temporary pleasure as our gods.

Parents of children who understand this dynamic can help them avoid the common pitfalls, and guide them away from a weight-gaining approach to life. Most parents, however, have also been raised with a quick-results mentality and therefore unwittingly pass this dangerous attitude onto the next generation.

If you want to think in decades, you should first focus on breaking out of this cultural programming. The short-term consumer mindset is optional.

Decade Decision Making

How exactly do you think in decades? Here are some principles:

• Responsibility — Take full responsibility for your decisions. Stop relying on other people’s opinions. The common consensus is often not the correct one. The path of least resistance is designed to keep society functioning. It hasn’t been designed with you in mind, and it doesn’t care about what’s best for you.

• Delayed gratification — Wean yourself off the need for instant gratification. Our dopamine-fueled, on-demand lifestyles have weakened our ability to think in decades.

• Learn to love the process — Find enjoyment in what you’re doing. Celebrate the small wins. The subtle happiness that is produced from taking the right action every day can be enough to sustain you.

• Patience — Always keep in mind that you’re playing a long-term game. Nothing needs to happen overnight. I’d go even further and say that nothing should happen overnight. Quick results rarely hold up. Understanding this allows you to be patient and persistent with your goals.

Good Things Take Time

“To succeed at anything, the success must come gently, with a great deal of effort but with no stress or obsession.” — Carlos Castaneda

The person who achieves rare things does not do so through narrow thinking. They gaze into the future with a strategic view of what is possible. Time and again, they choose to make small investments in themselves, never shifting their gaze from the mountain peak.

The whims of life may blow them off course, but they keep calm and always find their way back to their chosen path. They can do this because they understand that good things take time and that persistence is required over the long haul if they want any hope of reaching the top.

This is the attitude of the wise, a slow and steady ascension toward a vision. There may be long periods where little progress is made, but they’re in no rush, for they have time on their side.

What’s possible?

Let's take a look at some examples of valuable outcomes that require thinking in decades:

• Education — Becoming well-educated takes decades. It’s not enough to do a course or two. It’s not enough to read a book now and again. If you want to understand life or even your professional field, you need to devote a significant amount of time to pursuing a big-picture understanding of it. Both intellectually and through experience. This is no small feat. Most people won’t do it because of the long-term time commitment. But if you commit to it, you can set yourself apart.

• Financial Freedom — Financial freedom is possible for those who are thinking long-term. Compound interest is powerful but requires cutting out reckless spending while focusing on wise investments. If you’re young and commit to this now, you’ll be able to reap the rewards throughout your life.

• Health — Your health is everything. Without it, all your goals and dreams go out the window. A blindspot for younger people is the inability to appreciate the gift of good health. Once your health is gone, it’s already too late, there’s no going back. This is why it’s vital to make decade-long decisions regarding your health.

• Ambitious Projects — This could be starting your own business. It could be developing yourself as an artist. Raising kids. Or even building an opera house in the middle of the jungle. These are all worthwhile projects that require thinking in decades. Projects that create significant value don’t happen overnight. They are the products of decade decision-making.

You Have One Shot

You don’t get a second shot at life. There’s no redo button. So if you're reading this essay and you feel something is missing. Maybe it’s time to develop a decade-long mindset.

Decide on a long-term goal and commit to it for at least ten years. This type of dedication to a vision is powerful. You might not see results right away, but keep at it over the long haul and eventually something will click.

Then take an even longer time horizon. What would be possible over the next twenty to thirty years? How would your life look if you worked towards your long-term goals without fail every day? Life is interesting because we do have a certain level of control over our direction and output. My goal here is to convince you not to take this freedom for granted, to use it wisely, and to take responsibility for the impact you want.

It’s within your power to do that. Just don’t expect it to happen overnight.

Ben Worrall