88 Prompts for Long Term Thinking
In January 2019 I wrote out scores of prompts for thinking long term that I felt should inform the foundation I was later co-chair of, The Long Now Foundation. These axioms were only shared internally, but I feel they would be useful to anyone trying to take a long view so I present them here.
1 Our aim is to improve the present by remembering the future.
2 Our religion is change.
3 We promote tools and systems that manage the resources of change.
4 Over time, the process of change itself changes, compounding change.
5 We are making the world safe for continuous compounding change.
6 The system that best manages compounded change is civilization.
7 We favor tools that operate upon civilization.
8 Civilization is long-term thinking; Long-term thinking is civilization.
9 We promote long-term thinking instead of long-term planning.
10 Plans vs perspective: Long-term planning is a type of answer; because answers are fixed they can become irrelevant during compounding change.
11 Long-term perspective is a type of question; because questions are open they can remake their meaning during change.
12 Long-term thinking keeps revisiting decisions so that unexpected solutions can be found later.
13 The best choices today are those that lead to a greater number of choices in the future.
14 We seek those possibilities that increase future possibilities for all.
15 Individually we are better off with expanding possibilities for everyone.
16 Civilization is the process of creating the maximum number of opportunities that work for the maximum number of people.
17 To maximize the greatest good means to maximize the longest good, because most of those affected are yet to be born.
18 Tomorrow will arrive without our help; our job is to make tomorrow as big as possible.
19 To fill our tomorrow with so many possibilities that they must be carried over to the day after tomorrow.
20 Finite games focus on how they end; infinite games focus on how they continue.
21 Where we work there is no winning; there is only improving the game, and keeping it going.
22 We want to create infinite games, where all who play, win.
23 We trust the future.
24 We are trying to equip the future so it can help itself.
25 There is far more future than there is the past; the future is a bigger territory.
26 Since progress is real, our descendants will have more information and better tools, which will make them more capable of fixing problems we can’t.
27 The uncertainty of the long-term is a penalty we can pay with technology.
28 Our job is to keep the process of progress going.
29 We can leverage the power of longevity to accomplish things brevity can not.
30 The force of compounding value is one of the most powerful things in the universe.
31 Long-term processes can create leverage that can produce disproportionate returns.
32 Even large setbacks and disasters can be overcome by small compounding over long terms.
33 To maximize compounding value the benefits must shift to the future.
34 Patience is rewarded. We seek tools and technologies for patience.
35 We encourage achievements that require big time and big systems.
36 The problems of civilization require solutions at the scale of civilization.
37 Civilization is multi-paced: Fast learns, slow remembers.
38 The pace of management must match the rate of change.
39 We encourage governance to protect slow infrastructure to ensure freedom in the fast things.
40 The only successful ways of directing self-replicating generations are indirect ways, by the transmission of values.
41 Thinking about the future is a way to think about the systems.
42 Focus not on the outcomes, but on the processes that produce outcomes.
43 In the long-term, success is increased mutualism.
44 We promote new ways to cooperate.
45 Civilization has given us a new power: to choose who and what we are individually.
46 To optimize our humanity we have to optimize the source of our humanity: civilization.
47 We seek to optimize civilization.
48 If we achieve a desirable society, we will have made the individual better, too.
49 If we achieve a desirable future, we will have made the present better, too.
50 In the long interval, it pays to be altruistic.
51 We want to make long-term thinking automatic and common instead of difficult and rare.
52 Bigger things take bigger time.
53 An expanded sense of our time scale (the long now) is correlated to an expanded sense of place.
54 The long now needs the big here.
55 The most important things will take more than one lifetime to complete.
56 Let’s design a system so that 90% of the benefits are delivered after we are all dead.
57 Create better ways to reschedule the payout.
58 We are committed to representing the interests of the future to the present.
59 The present needs no defenders. The citizens of the future are unborn, so we the living will be their proxy.
60 We aim to be good ancestors.
61 To be a good ancestor means doing the things you wished your ancestors did. What do we wish our great-grandparents did?
62 We’d like to improve the ways of being accountable to posterity.
63 Every idea about the future is a prediction.
64 Nearly all predictions are wrong. But some are useful.
65 The future doesn’t need to be plausible; it only needs to be possible.
66 Our present estimates of the future are clouded by plausibility. We should practice seeing the outrageous, ridiculous, and improbable, because that is what today is compared to the past.
67 This present moment used to be the unimaginable future.
68 The future is purchased by the present.
69 We have more obligation to the future than the past.
70 The tyranny of the present can only be offset by possible futures.
71 The future is no more free of the past than the present is.
72 Our optimism about the future lies not in how small we think our current problems are but how large we believe our capacities for improvement are.
73 Optimism is easier if you take the long view because most setbacks are offset by even small compounding gains.
74 A key advantage to taking the long view is that you will have few competitors there.
75 The more important the system, the more it has been shaped by history, and the longer its past.
76 To understand the far future, we must understand the deep past.
77 We seek to apply the lessons of the past to steer the future.
78 We seek to overcome the asymmetries in time that bias the past.
79 Uncertainty of the future is penalized more than uncertainty of the past.
80 Possible pain in the future gets more of our attention than actual pain in the past.
81 Every life has the inherent ability to affect the future. That is what being alive means.
82 Every change that ripples out into the far future begins in an instant.
83 Things that have never happened before happen all the time.
84 We encourage wisdom: the ability to prospectively look back, to see today from the perspective of a distant tomorrow.
85 The real risk to civilization is not serious errors, but serious forgetting.
86 A longer view allows you to see what things do best with a short fast life; not everything needs to be slow or continuous.
87 More than just long-term responsibility, we encourage long-term imagination.
88 We seek to widen our individual and collective attention spans from the previous few minutes and next few minutes (the short now) to the previous 10,000 years and next 10,000 years.
Wonderful stuff as always, Kevin. Thanks for all your work. The spirit and trajectory of today's post reminds me very much of another list--one that I've kept close for more than five decades--Sheldon Kopp's "An Eschatological Laundry List: A Partial Register of the 927 (or was it 928?) Eternal Truths." The Illustrated version, No Hidden Meanings, contains these wonders: #12--It is a random universe to which we bring meaning," #18--If you have a hero, look again: you have diminished yourself in some way," #32--We must live within the ambiguity of partial freedom, partial power, and partial knowledge."
Thank you, Kevin, for sharing these thoughtful optimistic prompts for long-term thinking. I especially appreciated 72 and 73. Your observation that optimism rests not on minimising our problems but on believing in our capacity for improvement captures realistic optimism beautifully. The reminder that even small gains compound over time is a powerful reason to take the long view while continuing the work of improvement today.