Curated and distributed in WORK

The Promise of Immediate Payments Makes Our Brains Go Haywire

Are you working for the short-term or the long-term in your business and personal life

Dew Langrial
The Startup
Published in
5 min readAug 29, 2020

--

Three stacks and a jar of coins with small plants on each one.
Short term rewards vs. long term goals. — Image by Nattanan Kanchanaprat

When Facebook was a couple of years in, some big companies wanted to buy Facebook. Nearly everyone around Mark Zuckerberg — his entire team — wanted to sell. This opportunity was the startup dream come true.

I want to complete my projects before their deadlines, and I want to hand them over to the client to get my check. This check keeps me focused on my task. But does a completed project affect my future in any way?

The short answer is: ‘yes’ — the client may refer new clients in the future, or they may use my services again. That is the reason I try to improve the quality of my services.

If I thought only about the short term, I would finish the job and start looking for a new client. In this case, the quality of my work would probably not be that great.

Most of us are thinking about the short term most of the time. We need that check for obvious reasons. We are likely to follow the proverb: a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

--

--

Dew Langrial
The Startup

Living life in awe of it all. Hoping to make sense. A Thinker, Writer & Storyteller. Working on my tech startup. Visit me at: https://dewlangrial.blogspot.com/