People have a tendency to overestimate anything in a short period of time.
This is very normal especially in today’s fast paced technology driven world.
We’ve read that many great people are very patient and make relationships with long term goals and long term success.
Probably our normal mind cannot grasp the mathematics of compound effects quickly in different parts of life.
That may be the reason great people always say we overestimate what we can do in a year but underestimate what we can do in ten years.
In reality, many wildly specific innovations, projects, and life goals take a long time to build and grow.
We always measure the value of people at the end once we know the results.
That is just the stage of recognition, validation, and confirmation of the compounding effects by society.
Warren Buffette, Daniel Kahneman and slow thinking process
Warren Buffette, the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, became a billionaire investor only at age 56 even though he started the investment business at a very early age.
At age 11, he bought three shares of stock of Cities Service Preferred for him and his sister.
He said that he read every single book on investing in the Omaha library, some of them even twice, before making the stock purchase.
He eventually sold them and saved $1,000 to reinvest at the age of 14.
The essence is, in order to build something gigantic which nobody has built before, it takes a long time and an unwavering path of perseverance.
It will push people to leave certain things like instant gratification and comfort zone, which means reaching the other side of the mental zone through the process of slow thinking.
Daniel Kahneman, Nobel laureate and author of “Thinking, Fast and Slow” says “The world makes much less sense than you think. The coherence comes mostly from the way your mind works.”
There is a hard correlation between uncertainty, creativity, and long term success.
Because our brains are wired to crave certainty, but great achievements come from uncertainty and risk.
I think it all comes down to a slow thinking process, a willingness to experiment, an eagerness to unlearn the obsolete, and sharpening the human mind.
Daily habits bring values
To be able to sustain for a long period of time, we should be very mindful of our daily habits like nutrition, sleep, exercise, and stress.
Because these are fuels to run the human engine for a very long period of time.
How we think affects how we feel emotionally.
How we feel emotionally affects how we behave externally.
How we behave externally affects how we feel physically.
How we feel physically affects how we perform our work for an extended period of time.
In this series of changes of emotions there are multiple decision making processes which are heavily influenced by our daily nutrition, sleep, exercise, and stress.
Daily habits affect the core areas of our life, especially health, relationships, and passion.
The truth is that everything affects and impacts everything else remaining in life.
These are strongly interdependent and integrated for sustainable value creation.
For example, we cannot keep enjoying the task for a long time if we are not passionate about the task.
Fear is the result of toxic and reactive life
If we don’t know how to ignore toxic things and toxic people in life we suffer and we never sustain long term goals.
Learning to ignore means being proactive and laser focused for the things that matter in life.
A reactive life is the most painful life, we must learn not to be reactive over anything.
There are many practices not to be reactive but I generally follow one and it’s working for me.
If I receive a good message on my smartphone, I reply quickly but if it’s bad news, I don’t reply because I risk responding carelessly.
So I try to keep my negative feelings in check by not responding to the negative message immediately.
Because when we take time to respond, we move towards a slow thinking process and are less likely to make mistakes.
When we start to ignore toxicity and negativity, we start to light up our darker side in the mind that sees the long term goals and prosperity.
We start to feel no fear at all.
I have a personal experience of it when I was running a first marathon.
Marianne Williamson, spiritual leader and author of “A Return to Love” says – “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us.”
Beating fear also comes with the habit of ignoring bad circumstances.
Phiona Mutesi, four time women’s chess olympian from Uganda, grew up in one of the poorest violent slums but emerged as one of the world’s best chess players.
She lost her dad from AIDS when she was three years old.
After a few years, she lost her sister and then she dropped out from school and couldn’t read and write at age 9, eventually became homeless.
She said, “Chess is a lot like my life. If you make smart moves you can stay away from danger, but any bad decision could be your last.”
Research shows that mental practice is almost as effective as true physical practice and doing both is always more effective than either alone.
Brain research shows that thoughts produce the same mental instructions as real actions.
Mental image affects many cognitive processes in our brain.
Motor control, attention, perception, planning, decision making, and memory are some of them.
Brain always gets trained for actual performance during visualization and thinking.
People like Warren Buffette, Daniel Kahneman, and Phiona Mutesi are experts at avoiding fear by doing mental practice over and over again.
Elizabeth Gilbert, a journalist and author of “Big Magic” says “ Fear, I recognize and respect that you are part of this family, you are absolutely forbidden to drive.”
Another inspiring example on how to deal with fear comes from Darwin Smith.
Darwin Smith, the former CEO of Kimberly-Clark, was given less than a year to live due to nose and throat cancer, but he lived 25 more years, most of them as a CEO.
Integrity and honesty as core values
Nobody lies to us more than we lie to ourselves.
If somebody lies in public, comes home and stands in front of the mirror but cannot look at the mirror, it means there is an integrity and honesty problem.
If we are not true to ourselves, we can feel out of whack in life.
A life of integrity and honesty is always an extension of our personal values.
Personal values bring long term values so we have to bolster them, we have to find our essence so that we can utilize our potential.
This is the real difference between real and fake people.
We like people who always value humor, compassion, and respect equally both in public and in private.
Business ethics in organizations
Nowadays, not only people, even business organizations hide many things in front of the public.
It is a business gimmick.
They do this because they know we love instant gratification.
Why don’t they reveal the details is surprising.
Because we don’t care or are unable to calculate the long term effect of it.
For example, do you actually know the exact mathematical algorithm for credit score calculation?
The only thing credit card companies say is what percentage of different factors is accounted for in the calculation but not the exact formula.
We know that a high credit score doesn’t indicate we are good money managers, we are just good debt managers, but they don’t say this.
The American corporate world has hypnotized us and we love and enjoy living in the dark hole.
Probably we become more happy when we get our first credit card than our first kiss to our significant other.
In 2021, scientists in MIT used fMRI technology to examine brain activity during the moment of purchase using credit card, they focussed on the reward center of the brain called Striatum, which releases dopamine.
This is the same part of the brain that is activated by addictive drugs like cocaine and amphetamines.
This is another proof of how much we love instant gratification.
Dave Ramsey, personal finance guru and the author of ‘The Total Money Makeover‘ says “The credit card is the cigarette of the financial world.”
Conclusion
Great people are patient as well as visionary.
Great vision without great people, most of the time, doesn’t work because people have the navigating power for the changing world.
People always come before vision, strategy, tactics, technology, and anything else.
These all are only parameters to recognize, validate, and confirm the value of people after a certain time.
Walter Bruckart, former VP of Circuit City was asked once what are the top five factors that lead the transition from mediocrity to excellence of any enterprise.
He answered, one would be people, two would be people, three would be people, four would be people and five would be people.
Best people on biggest opportunities is one way to aim for enduring success.
Another way to access the immense success is to put the best people on the biggest problems.
Ultimately, these are the best parameters to value great people.
It is very difficult to value people in the beginning but later value appears in different forms when society recognizes, validates, and confirms them.
The only thing is whether we play the game of patience or instant gratification.
Valued people built enduring greatness through a blend of personal humility, perseverance, and professional will.
Warren Buffette is the cumulative compounding effect of many many decades.
Daniel Kahneman’s Nobel prize is the compounding effect of many many decades of passionate work on psychology research.
Similarly, Phiona Mutesi’s accomplishment is the compounding effect of multiple unwavering decisions despite many terrible circumstances in her life.
The bottom line is we all are valuable whatever we do and wherever we live.
Each one of us has something to show, nurture, and contribute.
The director of the hospital or the janitor, both are contributing to run the hospital smoothly.
It’s up to the society when and how each one of them will be recognized, validated, and confirmed as a value creator.
It’s so true that a valuable life means we don’t wait for society to recognize, validate, and confirm what we do.
We just go out and do many things.
What keeps us going is other valuable people around us who are changing the world and bringing value.
Happy New Year 2025 to all of you.
Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.