The Long Game

Jeff Bezos, in his 2018 letter to Amazon shareholders, tells an unusual story about handstands. “A close friend recently decided to learn to do a perfect free-standing handstand,” he recounted.4 She took a handstand workshop at a yoga studio, but wasn’t progressing as fast as she wanted, so she hired—yes!—a handstand coach. Bezos recounts what the

As Aikido master George Leonard notes, “In the land of the quick fix it may seem radical, but to learn anything significant, to make any lasting change in yourself, you must be willing to spend most of your time on the plateau, to keep practicing even when it seems you are getting nowhere.”

Content creation. You can’t become known for your ideas if other people don’t know what they are. Thus, you need to find a way to create content, whether that’s through writing articles, giving speeches, starting a podcast, making videos, holding lunch-and-learns, or whatever channel you prefer.

I wrote these questions out: What should I spend my time doing? What are the 20% of my activities that will yield 80% of the results? What can I stop doing? How can I use constraints to my advantage? What are my hypotheses about the future—and how do they inform my actions today? Over the next hour, I wrote pages of notes with answers to those ques

The key is to make yourself “findable” by the people you’d most like to do business with.

Part of playing the long game is understanding that you can’t always immediately jump into the ring. Moving slow may feel like wasting time. But every moment you spend understanding the nature of the game, and how it works, makes you stronger once you do get in.

For a full year, I committed myself to studying. I made a list of all the things I didn’t know that I suspected I needed to.

When we make the choice to optimize for interesting, we’re investing in our future selves. We don’t know where it will lead, and that’s the whole point. Playing the long game means preparing ourselves for an uncertain future, where, because of the effort we’ve invested over time, we’re ready to take full advantage of the opportunities life presents

To overcome an extreme enemy—his health challenges—he created an extreme goal for himself. And day by day, through his unglamorous regimen of physical therapy and strengthening exercises, he made his vision real.