The Long Game

“How can we think really long-term about winning the thing we want to win, especially when it’s beyond our lifetime?”

“How can we think really long-term about winning the thing we want to win, especially when it’s beyond our lifetime?” -Chani Nicholas

I’ve always been a long-game kind of person. It’s just how my mind works.

I’m obsessed with the Cosmic Calendar, a method used to visualize the chronology of the universe that my mother says makes her brain hurt. A friend tells me about their new business idea and I jump to “so what’s the ultimate, pie-in-the-sky goal?” I even wrote my childhood diary with longevity in mind, envisioning it being found after I was long gone and wanting to paint the clearest picture possible of the world around me and how I felt about it (can you tell I was a big fan of the Dear America series). The idea of some future-someone reading my teenage journals makes me cringe now — it’s basically a lot of sad/mad dappled with sketches of my daily outfits and way-too-detailed theatre reviews — but the sentiment I had back then remains the same. It’s important to figure out how you want who you are to fit into the puzzle that is life.

I’m a forest kinda person: I see the forest, and work backwards to slowly and mindfully grow each tree.

But LOL, joke’s on me for choosing career paths that looove to validate the trees that seem to have grown the fastest.

I’m writing this two months after the one-year anniversary of the release of WANT YOUR SELF. Over the course of the past year, I’ve been asked countless times: is the book doing well?

I know what people usually mean when they ask this. They want to know if it’s sold an impressive number of copies. They want to know if it’s gotten celebrity attention. They want to know if I’ve gone viral.

I’ve come to accept that these questions are natural, and therefore it’s a waste of energy to be frustrated by them. I know better than to get caught up in the minutae of the moment.

Or at least that’s what I’d like to tell myself.

A few weeks ago, I opened my phone and saw that a podcast I follow — a pie-in-the-sky-dream-conversation kind of podcast — had just released an interview all about self-talk. This interview featured…well, not me. And it made me feel a lot of things.

I felt petty and defeated. I felt “not successful enough.” I felt myself comparing myself to someone I didn’t know, caring about sales and visibility metrics I actually don’t care that much about in any other moment (other than this one).

I’d like to stretch the truth and tell you “This rarely if ever happens!!!” But I’m human. So it’s very *DUH* that I know this feeling well. It’s the same feeling I get when I go to buy a pair of jeans in the brand new style that looks so chic on everyone I know, take them to the dressing room to try them on, and they fit like crap. It’s the same feeling I get when I buy a rare lottery ticket or scratcher on vacation “because I never do this” and end up with zilch besides little silver flakes underneath my nails where I scratched off the coating. The same feeling I get when I tell myself it’s a beautiful day for a run, but then work piles up and I end up sitting at my computer all day — then when Jeremy asks how my day was I tell him it was lousy.

It’s the feeling of being taken out of the long game, and letting the momentary disappointment mean way more than it actually does.

(it’s hard to focus on anything else when the close-up is so pretty, right?)

THE LONG GAME

“Playing the long game” means being committed to the idea that you’ll go the distance to accomplish your goals, even if they seem far-off, and you’ll take the necessary steps to get there. Because once you do, your goal will be real, it will be alive, and it will be lasting.

You might not get those instant obvious wins in the moment, but they’re not what really matter anyway. You keep going, because you know you’re in it for something bigger.

By design, a long game is usually pretty big. Because it usually takes many steps for it to come to fruition. A long game can’t be won quickly, because it requires trial, error, and lessons that only TIME can bring.

For example: My long game is *to shift the entire cultural self-talk paradigm.* A big huge massive goal, yes. But one I truly believe can be done — if I don’t get in my own way and stop because of some reason like “I can’t see it happening” or “there are too many steps to get there” or “other people think that *that* level of change is unattainable.”

If I’m playing the long game, I accept that my proof points might be so small I can barely recognize them in the moment. I accept that the steps might be many. I accept that others might not believe it’s possible or that it goes against human nature of that “it is what it is.”

Because I also accept that it’s only when you zoom out that you can see how every small step forward caused the tides to shift irrevocably. Micro moments of change usually go unnoticed. The wisest thing you can do is pay close attention, and keep going.

MY LONG GAME TOOL KIT

To keep myself focused on my own Long Game when something pulls my focus and drags me down, here are a few things I do:

• Have a trusted friend on speed dial: Do you remember the “phone-a-friend” option on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? Same concept. Have a friend, family member, or colleage with whom you mutually agree to hype up when asked, or remind of your goals, or whatever you usually need in the moment. This person is not just any person. This is a person who you trust fully with your most vulnerable self. Who is invested in your safety, your mental health, and your fulfillment.
  
  When I saw that interview with Not-Me, I texted a best friend immediately: “Phoning a friend for a quickie favor and calling in some words of encouragement.” Yes, these were my exact words. Ask for exactly what you need from this person — so that they can deliver what you need when you can’t deliver it to yourself.
  

• Make Future-You your mentor: Humans are notoriously bad at future-casting: seeing beyond the moment they’re in and making decisions with the future front-of-mind. Studies have shown that some people view their Future Selves as a total stranger, or even someone that isn’t real. This can make it really hard to care about that person (made even harder if you’re not someone who regularly thinks about making choices on behalf of strangers). It’s why so many people struggle with things like saving money or developing an exercise routine: they simply cannot envision a time in which that slow, tedious work of the Now would come in handy.
  
  Therefore, you’ve gotta make Future-You REAL, and make that person your mentor. You don’t have to completely flesh out the details of Future-You just yet (although I highly recommend it, but that’s a post for another day). But try to envision yourself transported into the future, looking back on the moment you’re in as not the present moment but a moment in history. What would THAT person want you to do right now? Where would THAT person hope they’d be at that stage in their lives — and looking back, what would they either be so glad they did, or super pissed they didn’t do? Would the thing you’re toiling over right now matter all those years down the line, or would you forget it even happened? Would you say you used your energy and resources efficiently, or that you wish you’d been more thoughtful?
  

• Take one long-game focused step in the short term: This is important. The other two are too, but you can’t play the long game if you’re not actually PLAYING. There is a difference between thinking about doing something and actually doing it. Ask yourself: what is the smallest or easiest possible step I can take right now toward my greater vision? Then take it. Action begets action. The goal right now isn’t to figure out the entire long game in an instant, it’s to move your chess pieces strategically, one by one.

  

THE LONG HAUL

I try not to get caught up in the short-term disappointments, but I’m human. Whether it’s a social media post that gets lackluster engagement or it’s a relationship that isn’t right for you, it’s really easy to get consumed by the moment you’re in and forget about what you ACTUALLY desire.

If you’re like me, you’ve got to keep asking yourself, over and over:

Am I in this for the quick hit…or am I in this for the long haul?

And this rings MOST true for those Cosmic Calendar -type desires. The stuff that, like Chani said, might not come to fruition any time soon.

Yes, visible wins are one metric of success. But IMO they’re more like a symptom of/supplement to lasting success, rather than “success” itself. We often confuse the two, get swept up in the quick hit that visible win brings, assume we’re all good…and then the real success we SAID we wanted so much doesn’t come to life.

The thing is, if we’re truly successful, there might be a whole heap of impact we don’t see. Lives we’re never aware we touch.

And if impact is what we’re after, I think we need to make peace with that, and keep playing the long game anyway.

Because lasting impact is something we can’t control. We don’t know what the future might bring, what other people might think, what might stick and what might not.

But it’s not our job to obsess over the “mights” and hypotheticals. Those are useful to a point. After a certain point, they’re just distractions keeping us in the same loops, getting nowhere.

The best we can do is show up with everything we’ve got, leave it all in the table, and trust that our burning desire to make a difference means we’re on the way to making one.