I am reflecting this morning on the benefits that I have realized from maintaining a few good habits for a long period of time. The consistency of putting these personal commitments first in my life has started to have an impact on other areas of my life and I wanted to share a few. I have focused on overcoming personal struggles, getting past the hard times and embracing the suck. There is definitely a light at the end of the tunnel. Those days when you just do it anyway, despite your suffering will pay off.
The first major benefit I have seen is what I would like to refer to as “long haul” thinking. The opposite of this would be short term thinking, thoughts and decisions for today rather than a year, ten or even a hundred years from now. In fact, I have been thinking lately, extremely long term. 5 or 6 generations long term. Think about it for a moment. Do you know who your great, great, grandfather/mother was on either side? Perhaps you know their name, but do you know who they were?
We live in a time where things we do/say/think are going to be captured more consistently. We do not know the impact of that yet. We have not even gone through a generation yet of having this type of public information on a person. However, what is it going to be like when we have 5 or 6 generations of social media presence on people? Preservation of that material is going to become a discipline in the computer science world and I have to wonder are we going to have an impact on our descendants? Is the moment today when I decided to make that tough difficult decision and look to the long haul going to pay off 5 generations from now? That is long haul thinking.
When you do something everyday to benefit your future self, you stop being controlled by the demands of the moment. Sure you think you are hungry, but that chocolate fudge coated brownie is NOT going to get me to that future self, and it certainly will not help me live longer. So long haul thinking decides to drink a glass of water and wait for my planned healthy lunch, because that is going to get me there. The short term is demanding, and our decisions are impacted by them more often. I have noticed that the more I put aside my temporary fatigue, my temporary laziness, my “drothers”, then I am more capable of seeing the future vision of 5, 10, 20, 400 years from now.
Long Haul thinking is not easy, it is gained over time. It becomes clouded when we discard personal commitments and choose to indulge in temporary relief of a symptom in our lives. The better we become at understanding how our daily decisions impact our future, the more we realize how we really have to consider our daily activities as investments for the future we want to build for ourselves, our loved ones and for future generations.
I do not want to come off as one who has this all figured out, I certainly do not. I absolutely choose the moment over the long haul all the time. Who ever said that you need to live in the moment, however, never actually learned how. I am confident that you can only actually live in the moment once you have decided to put your future first, disregard the failures of the past, and commit to put your daily investment in improvement first. Only then can you take that deep breath and truly enjoy the moment.
Guy Reams (395)
365 Alumni
118 Days Left to 1st Marathon
