The long run is just a collection of short runs you have to put up with. Saying you have a ten year time horizon doesn't exempt you from al the non-sense that happens in the next ten years. Everyone has to experience the recessions, the bear markets, the meltdowns, the surprises and the memes. So rather than assume long term thinkers don't have to deal with short-notice nonsense, ask the question: how can I endure a never-ending parade of nonsense?

True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking. It’s not about any single accomplishment. It is about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement. Ultimately, it is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress.

As a species, we haven’t evolved to plan 20 years into the future. As a rule, our decision-making is myopic, shortsighted, and lacks imagination. We’re heavily incentivized to seek rewards in the present, which can greatly cost our long-term Future Selves.

[If you don't] think and strategize long term, [you'll be distracted by the short-term.]
You’ll be caught up by endless distractions throughout your day.
Your decisions will be myopic.
You’ll cost your Future Self greatly, putting them deeper in debt in all ways.

Don’t take an eye on the short term but think long.

The idea of long-term planning is a relatively new concept from a human evolution standpoint. We weren’t evolved to live this long and have to make plans for the very distant future. Storing food for the next month or two, sure. But, to think about stocking away a retirement nest egg in case I’m retired for 30 years? This is relatively foreign. You couple that novel aspect of planning with the idea that we’re very swayed by everything that is happening in the present. It’s very easy to ignore the long, long run, and really hard to ignore all the pulls on our attention right now. Spending more money right now and eating something delicious right now — it’s appealing to do those things because we know we get the rewards right now. But to not do those things — to not spend, to not eat unhealthily — so that our long-run selves can be better off, well, that’s a hard proposition for a lot of people because the present is so powerful.” — Dr. Hal Hershfield38

Long-term thinking requires a clarity the natural human mind is not good at.

Long-term planning is often undervalued by our indefinite short-term world.

A paradox of life is that the greatest returns come in the long-term, but the opportunity cost of moving slowly is huge.

Long-term thinking is not slow acting.

Act fast on things that compound. Never let a day pass without doing something that will benefit you in a decade.

Here’s how to live: Think super-long-term.

The argument of the “long view” may be correct in some meaninglessly abstract sense, but it represents a fundamental mistake in categories and time scales. Our only legitimate long view extends to our children and our children's children's children—hundreds or a few thousands of years down the road. If we let the slaughter continue, they will share a bleak world with rats, dogs, cockroaches, pigeons, and mosquitoes. A potential recovery millions of years later has no meaning at our appropriate scale.

Unfortunately, Doug, we have lost the long-term perspective, and we are suffering from an absurd and very unwise belief that there can be unlimited economic development on a planet of finite natural resources, focusing on short-term results or profits at the expense of long-term interests.

I had divided my to-do list into three categories: short-, medium-, and long-term. Short-term meant “a couple of weeks,” medium-term meant “a couple of years,” and long-term meant “as long as it takes.” It was that far side of the ledger where I wrote down the most intractable problems we were facing — the ones you can’t expect to solve on your own, over a term, perhaps even over a career. That’s where the most important work is. That’s where you take the bigger view — not of the political moment but of the historical one.

Long-Term Success Requires Short-Term Focus.

In the view of infinity, any defined long-term is short-term.