Decisions for the next decade

The decisions we make today are not always in harmony with the outcomes we desire in the future.

Sometimes the easier thing done today is just a debt incurred on your (and your team’s) future self.

A half-baked solution that you cobble together today that technically works may very well command a high price down the road when you realize it doesn’t scale.

The decision to give up on a problem, because it feels too hard today, may very well cost you the massive reward you would have otherwise received if you’d chosen to stick with it.

We have a cognitive bias for short-term rewards, which sometimes makes it difficult to think about our decisions on the scale of how they may impact us over the next year or decade.

But what if there’s a simple way to reframe things to exploit this feature? What if we learn to see the act of making a decision for the long term, for our future selves, as a reward in and of itself?

In a sense, you get a cookie now and you get another one later.

Maybe that would give us the best of both worlds.