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Well, here it is Monday again. Amazing. Ready to get back to the work-at-hand? I am. In fact, I spent part of the weekend thinking about our new website – and what I wanted from it for our members, and for the general public who comes to us for insights on the value of women in funeral service – and to locate a women funeral service professional in their area who can help them. In other words, I spent the weekend thinking “long term.” It’s really high time I did so; after all, we’re one year old now, and truly an ‘entity.’ And, as I’m 56, and certainly not going to be “at the helm” for more than another 10 years, I needed to see ‘the horizon’ more clearly.

I’m going to share the words of Brian Tracy – something I do rather frequently, because he’s one smart guy…his email newsletter arrived in my inbox this morning, and it’s timely, to be sure. “The Law of Time Perspective” is the title of the article. I’ve highlighted those passages I feel most important…

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The most successful people in any society are those who take the longest time period into consideration when making their day-to-day decisions. This insight comes from the pioneering work on upward financial mobility in America conducted by Dr. Edward Banfield of Harvard University in the late 1950′s and early 1960′s. After studying many of the factors that were thought to contribute to individual financial success over the course of a person’s lifetime, he concluded that there was one primary factor that took precedence over all the others. He called it “time perspective.”

Plant Trees

What Banfield found was that the higher a person rises in any society, the longer the time perspective or time horizon of that person. People at the highest social and economic levels make decisions and sacrifices that may not pay off for many years, sometimes not even in their own lifetimes. They “plant trees under which they will never sit.”

Doctors

An obvious example of someone with a long time perspective is the man or women who spends ten or twelve years studying and interning to become a doctor. This person takes extraordinarily long time to lay down the foundation for a lifetime career. And partially because we know how long it takes to become a doctor, we hold doctors in the highest esteem of any professional group. We appreciate and admire the sacrifices that they have made in order to be able to practice a profession that is so important to so many of us. We recognize their long time perspectives.

Long Time Perspectives

People with long term perspectives are willing to pay the price of success for a long, long time before they achieve it. They think about the consequences of their choices and decisions in terms of what they might mean in five, ten, fifteen, and even twenty years from now.

Short Time Perspectives

People at the lowest levels of society have the shortest time perspectives. They focus primarily on immediate gratification and often engage in behaviors that are virtually guaranteed to lead to negative consequences in the long term. At the very bottom of the social ladder, you find hopeless alcoholics and drug addicts. These people think in terms of the next drink or the next fix. Their time perspective is often less than one hour.

Delayed Gratification is the Key to Financial Success

Your ability to practice self-mastery, self-control, and self-denial, to sacrifice in the short term so you can enjoy greater rewards in the long term, is the starting point of developing a long time perspective. This attitude is essential to financial achievement of any kind.

Action Exercise

Practice a long term perspective in every area of your life, especially in your financial life but also with your family and your health. Think of where you would ideally like to be in five years and begin today to take steps in that direction.

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I’ve been trained by my spiritual mentors to live in the “moment,” the “now;” but that’s not serving us, is it? I need to think LONG TERM…as in LONG after I’m gone. I don’t want our organization to end when I do…not to be a “downer” on this Monday morning! So, I’ve got to shift gears, and think differently. At least about the AWFD. With that said, let me say this: we’ve got big changes coming! BIG changes! Stay tuned….