
Decisions that we make, or choose not to make define the course of our destiny, whether that be life or business. In a sense this is not philosophy, it is scientific logic.
Consider Nokia, for example, during the period of 2000-2010 (as published in an INSEAD case study), the company was super confident of its own products and ignored all warning signs of the iPhone in 2007. The leaders took decisions to prolong the shelf-life of existing products and existing people in key roles, rather than explore something new. The decisions defined the destiny.
The decision-destiny journey is observable everywhere….
— We decide our political leaders
— We choose our jobs
— We choose our loans
— We choose our food
— We choose our habitats
— We choose our partners
We choose and the we suffer. We can blame but can’t hide from the fact that we made the choice!
Our choices and decisions are far too often inflicted with Temporal Myopia. Temporal Myopia is the inability to see or consider the long-term outcomes of an action that you are contemplating.
Our brains get very focused on the short term gratifications of our decisions, temporal myopia kicks in, we don’t see further than that. Then we live to suffer.
In business terms this can be excessively and currently focused on…
This quarter growth
The current products
Value that we can get now
Current marketing mix
Current people
Immediate growth
There is enough scientific analysis available to suggest two things: one that companies become institutions only when they overcome temporal myopia, and two that almost no company is able to sustain being in Fortune 100 list over a period of time because they never looked far enough !!
There is no mystery why our brain prefers the built-in bias to immediate gratification.
From Adam and Eve’s apple dilemma to the modern-day compulsion to spend a significant portion of your income on Apple, Temporal Myopia is not going anywhere.
Historically life was short. Unpredictability was high. Survival was paramount. SO human beings trained themselves to think about the next few months.
This has changed now. The biggest threats to human beings, to businesses, to countries, arise from the lack of long-term thinking.
Consider this — everyone in the long term strives to be happy and healthy, yet a vast majority end up unhappy and unhealthy, in business and in life.
The society achieves the opposite in love, health, relationships, or in business, finances, peace, and environment. How come?
The consequence of our evolutionarily inherited present bias is that we tend to make temporally myopic decisions, that influence not only our health and finances, but also encourage us to elect officials who promise short-term “solutions” aimed at exploiting our shortsightedness rather than actually solving problems.
If you are in a stage of your life where you find yourself dissatisfied or unhappy over anything that is personal or business, you are there, mostly as a consequence of your myopic decision making. It doesn’t stop. It’s a spiral. Our getting out of situations triggers another myopic choice. And soon we look at life and business consumed in a web of entanglements.
So what do we do?
Classically Daniel Coleman wrote in Emotional Intelligence decades ago
“delay gratification”