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Make Your Vision for the Future a Reality by Learning How to “Think in Decades”
“We radically underestimate what we can accomplish in a decade.”
-Dorie Clark, The Long Game
Bill Gates once said that we tend to overestimate the amount of change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the amount of change that will occur in the next ten.
When I applied this same idea to my career (and life) trajectory, that’s when everything started to come together.
Progress is slow — damn near invisible — in the beginning, but after ten years (and often much sooner) we can barely comprehend that we’ve been able to achieve and create that much change.
Once your time horizon — the length of time you’re willing to commit to becoming successful — becomes extended, everything else about the way you live your life can change too. It helps takes some of the pressure off of you in the short term and it expands your possibilities in the long term.
It’s the difference between chess and checkers; night and day.
Ten years is a long time for radical accomplishment, but since human beings don’t tend to do so well with internalizing larger numbers, we tend to ignore that fact.
