Play the long game

Most people play the short game today. In a world where everyone wants quick wins, playing the long game and reap its rewards.

Do what everyone else is doing = get same results everyone else is getting.

Basically if everyone goes left and you go left, you should expect average results unless you're lucky.

I don't want to be average. I don't want the same outcomes as everyone else. I want different (hopefully better) outcomes. And that definitely comes from taking action and executing on what the majority DOESN'T DO.

The problem is we don’t want the same outcomes as everyone else. We want different outcomes. Different outcomes come from doing different things or doing things differently.

It's really 2 sides of a coin. I don't want to end up in the middle, but if we leave it to luck, we'll end up on either end of the curve (Of course, we want to be on the right side of this curve in most aspects of life. To be the top 0.1%).

Luck is important, but don't bank on it. Don't rely on it. It's called luck for a reason. It's randomness. Variance.

It's easy to overestimate the role of luck because it's quite apparent in the lives of people around us. Someone hit the jackpot, someone got accepted into some top university programme on scholarship, someone met someone important in a lift and landed a life changing internship.

This makes it convenient to underestimate the importance of investing in success every single day. Too often, we convince ourselves that success is just luck.

We tell ourselves the kid who landed a life-changing internship paying top dollar was just lucky. No. He/she probably wasn’t. He/she was playing a different game than you were. They're playing the long game.

After spending the first 4 years of my career optimising on the short game, I've decided to play the long game.

The truth about the long game is it's honestly simpler to win than the short game.

Simple but not easy.

It requires repeatedly doing hard things today that make tomorrow easier.

Doing the thing that you from 1 year from now would be grateful you did.

People who lack patience play the short game (honestly, we all lack patience, humans were NOT optimised for playing the long game aka delayed gratification, because in our hunter gatherer times, tomorrow is not guaranteed.)

Everyone wants to win. Nobody wants to lose.

The real question is what are you optimising for? Either way in life you will lose somehow. What's important is you win the battles that matter. You lose some battles to win the war.

Don't try to win the moment at the risk of losing the decade. Aim to win the decade, and win "just enough" in the moment.

The most successful people in any field all play the long game.

The long game is boring. It's not one hit wonder. It doesnt cause spotlights and attention. It doesn't make people go WOW. Thats hitting the lottery ticket. The long game works via compounding.

It works by accruing tiny advantages and stacking tiny wins, tiny surplus of assets and moat over time that aren’t noticed until success becomes too obvious to ignore.

The short game is intermittent. It’s like sprinting in a marathon. You won't last past 3 minutes. Life is more like a marathon than it is a sprint.

Yes you probably need to sprint sometimes but only when it matters, 99% of the journey is a marathon.

You sprint 3 minutes, rest 10 minutes, sprint 3 minutes, rest 10 minutes and the cycle go on, nothing meaningful comes out of this. This is the human condition.

Short games

Quick wins & immediate benefits seduce us into the short game.

You may win today but you're probably going to lose tomorrow.

The short game is short changing your customers. The short game is taking advantage of your partners. The short game is spending more than you earn to cheat growth.The short game is not investing in your relationships when you don’t need them.

The longer you play the short game, the harder things get.

The accumulation of small wins and tiny advantages makes the future easier and compounds the benefits. The opposite is true, the accumulation of tiny disadvantages makes the future harder.

If you take advantage of people, no one will like working with you. If you follow a get-rich-quick scheme, you'll lose-it-quick too. If you shortchange your customers, they'll eventually find out, they will leave and you'll forever need to hunt for new customers to shortchange. If you don’t invest in your relationship, people who love you will find it hard to stay by your side in the long run.

Think of playing poker. Your goal is to win. To take bets that are positive EV (expected value). You could be playing a tournament and need to stay in for a couple of hours. You need to win when it matters. If you're taking big unreasonable risks at the start you may win due to variance/luck, you may have the illusion of winning, but when if you keep doing this you cannot be lucky 10 times in a row. At some point you will lose. Don't make it harder than it needs to be. Optimise for the long game, win the tournament, not the "early game" only.

Long Games

From the outside, the long game looks pretty boring:

• Cancelling social plans to focus on work
• Exercise at least 1 hour a day
• Skipping parties so you can catch up on sleep
• Investing in relationships with time, money, attention when when you don't need anything from the other party
• Reading a book instead of watching Netflix
• Saving & investing your money instead of buying nice-to-have items for status

and so many more..

The only debate to the long game is that you may not live long enough to enjoy it.

"In the long run, we are all dead" - some economics quote I read years ago.

That's why I'd say go gather small wins and make sure we can put food on the table to live to reap the rewards of your long-game-investment.

On top of that, the global average life expectancy has more than doubled since 1900, rising from roughly 32 years to over 76 years in 2025.

It's not debatable that the long game wins. Everyone knows

• to be get abs, you need to manage your food intake
• to be strong, you need to lift heavy weights
• to be healthy, you need a balanced diet
• to get rich, we should spend less than we make and invest the difference and wait a long time.

It makes sense. It's reasonable. We all know it.

The key isn't knowledge, it's in discipline and patience.

The first step playing the long game is always the hardest.

You need to suffer a little today for tomorrow to be a little easier.

Be smart. Just because you can’t see the tiny advantage you created doesn’t mean it’s not there. Keep putting in the work.

Every repeated decision and every step you make in life is a spiral, make the right decisions and you're on an upward spiral, you feel better, you think fast, you look great, you get richer, you have more energy, more confidence, better relationships, etc..

The opposite is also true. You can spiral downwards. Cash flow becomes tight, you don't have meaningful relationships, you gain too much weight, you lose confidence, you feel horrible...

Every thing you do is a step toward the short game or the long game.

This is the hidden rule in the game of life. You can't opt out. And time will tell which game you've been playing. The difference between short game vs long game strategies will be amplified with time. Long games help you compound. The longer you play, the bigger the winnings.

The question to think about is when and where to play a long-term game.

A good place to start is with things that compound: knowledge, relationships, and finances.

You can't play the long game in everything and win in everything.

Pick your battles. Pick what matters to you.