Life is all about balance.
Balancing your time, your budget, your diet,
what you want to do with what you need to do -
finding the best middle-ground between two, often diametrically opposed, things.
This is an old idea. Chinese Philosophy has yin and yang,
and Buddhists have been talking about ‘the middle way’ for two thousand years.
But one balance that’s often ignored
is that between the short term and the long term.
To explain that idea,
let’s forget Chinese Philosophy and Buddhist teachings for a moment,
and look instead at one of the 20th century’s most seminal works of
philosophy and scientific ambition.
I’m talking, of course,
about Back to the Future.
In many ways, the heroes of Back to the Future exemplify
what we mean by long and short term thinking.
Marty McFly is an aspiring guitarist, but he’s too scared to send his demo tape
into the record label in case they hate it.
This short term fear of rejection is stopping him seeing
the potential long term benefits of submitting the tape.
His entire worldview is defined, and limited, by his short term thinking.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have Doc Brown,
an extreme example of a long term thinker.
He spends thirty years chasing one, near-impossible, long term goal -
to build a working flux capacitor and invent time travel.
And yes, he eventually succeeds, but in the ensuing 30 years
he’s ignored the short term so much that he’s spent his entire family fortune,
and ends up being murdered by Libyan terrorists he’s had to rip off
in order to achieve his goal.
This is definitely not what good planning looks like.
His success is based more on luck than judgement.
And of course, if he failed it would be a fairly boring movie
and not the cinematic masterpiece it so clearly is.
So on their own, neither of these work.
We need to find a balance between both long and short terms.
While this can seem tricky when two ideas like these appear so contradictory,
it’s entirely possible.
In the business world, it comes down to exploit vs explore:
the extent to which a company
is leveraging what it already knows in the short term, versus how much it’s
exploring new possibilities for the long term.
Countless companies have gone from industry leaders to punchlines
simply shifting the balance too far towards exploit.
Kodak, Blockbuster, Motorola
they all became less innovative as they became more successful,
and ultimately failed to have a long term vision.
It happens the other way around too -
Companies who favoured exploration too heavily.
But you won't know the names of any. Why?
Because they set their sights on long term goals they were never able to deliver.
They ignored the short term and never got off the ground.
So where does the balance lie?
In reality, the answer is different for every company,
but a great example is SpaceX.
Now, it’s no secret that SpaceX want to go to Mars,
and as long term goals go, that’s a doozy.
But let’s take a look at what they're doing at the moment:
There’s their Falcon series of rockets
and their satellite internet project Starlink.
Then there's an Earth to Earth transport system, using StarShip,
and #dearMoon, a Lunar Tourism project for a Japanese billionaire.
Now those of you paying attention may have noticed that
none of these things involve going to Mars.
So what gives?
Well two things crucial to getting to Mars are money and know-how.
All these projects make SpaceX money -
NASA, the US military and countless private companies
will pay to launch satellites.
The money involved in bringing high speed internet to rural locations
is sure to be lucrative.
People are definitely going to pay to fly New York to Singapore
in one hour rather than seventeen.
And as for the billionaire space tourist? Yeah, that’s not a cheap ticket.
As well as the money though, achieving these short term goals
is a great way to work towards their long term goals.
Falcon rockets were never meant to get to Mars,
but they earned the company money and taught them valuable lessons.
And with every rocket and satellite built, every launch - every failure - they gain
useful data in the short term which will help them to succeed in the long term.
In this way SpaceX’s model embodies the balance that we’re talking about.
Bill Gates said that
“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year
and underestimate what they can do in ten”.
The real lesson there isn’t about
just improving your one year plan or your ten year plan,
it's about understanding and developing the relationship between them,
in order to achieve both by striking a balance between the two.