The Perils of Short-Term Focus
Career Management, Personal Growth, professional developmentOh the perils of short-term focus! Excessive absorption with quick fixes and instant results can be hazardous to your health. Short-Term Focus when done in moderation is not all bad. However, people who exhibit intense focus on the short-term tend to be:
- Frantically driven by the desire to satisfy an all-consuming need for instant success.
- Subject to every “get-rich-quick” scheme and exaggerated promise of high return on investment (emotional or financial).
- Impulsive and more susceptible to moral and ethical temptations.
- Less resilient and unable to successfully rebound from setbacks.
- More concerned with outcomes and results than how they are achieved.
- Extreme creatures of habit who refuse to change methods when tackling new challenges; thus suffering a severe and painful wrenching when the old equation doesn’t work anymore.
- Stressed-out and under pressure to put out fires and accomplish immediate tasks rather than concentrating on how to be proactive and prevent fires from occurring in the first place.
Short-term focus is habit-forming and can lead to the development of a maintenance mindset. It must make way for long-term perspective.
What is long-term perspective and how does it form? This perspective is a mental view or outlook that carefully and continually considers the effect of today’s actions on future ones. It is formed by:
- Maximizing your lifetime value. Always doing your best-asking yourself, “What decisions or activities will help me to be more effective a year from now than I am today?”
- Cultivating patience. Refusing to be intimidated by the expectations of others. No one person can do everything. Each of us must learn what we have been gifted to do; then do it.
- Never giving up. Staying with something until the job gets done. Regardless of what the job is, when you are given something to do-just do it. Then, make sure you finish it.
- Thinking strategically. Practicing forward thinking and the art of the long-view. Developing a plan and set of actions that will keep you energized and focused on the big picture.
- Lightening up. Balancing all that intensity and refusing to wear yourself out trying to get rich.
- Exhibiting the joy that comes from a refreshed and balanced life.
- Deciding what you hope to achieve. Pledging your resources to achieve the goals you have set.
Developing a long-term perspective requires commitment, purpose and binding yourself to a fixed course of action. Take some time this week to reflect on your focus and determine which perspective you will embrace.
