Seizing short-term opportunities

Our emotions are obsessed with the present moment because it’s difficult to look past our immediate fears and anxieties. And this prevents good decision-making.

The sweet spot in decision-making is to find the short-term failures that enable huge long-term successes to happen in th...

It’s easier for our brains to process concrete and immediate outcomes rather than abstract and future things. So the short-term effort easily dominates the long-term upside in our minds— behavioral scientists call this present bias.

Most of us imagine that we engage in some form of long-term thinking; after all, we have goals and plans. And basically we are in denial about this because it is hard to have perspective about our own decision-making process. The best way to overcome this is to recognize the clear signs of short ...