Long-Term Thinking – Episode 472

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[00:01] Welcome to the Prosperity Podcast. Prosperity thinkers, welcome to this episode. We’re going to be talking about long term thinking. And in particular, I have found that it is most useful in a volatile market. And we’re going to say volatile market as in any day that we’re alive right now. So Kim, share with us about long-term thinking and how that’s helped you. Well, I’m so grateful for Dan Sullivan, my strategic coach person, because he has helped me with this also. I think for a large part of my life, I’ve always been fairly long-term thinking because when you live on a farm, it just gets indelb in you. You know, you plant a garden and three, four months later you get something. You have a baby sheep or pig or cow born, and it’s four and five years

[00:52] later that you’re showing them at the fair, you know, that kind of thing. So it’s always been a part of my space and yet it’s really developed even further because when you work with life, it’s literally probably the longest thinking, longest term thinking, financial product that is in existence in the marketplace. And even I would expand it out beyond just a financial product, right? It just causes you to think long about your family and about super, super, super short, like we’re talking nanoseconds we’ve gotten. You know, we all know that the parrots or whatever it is that the scientists use to figure out our attention span has gone from like seven to two minutes down to 30 seconds or something like that, you know, the,

[01:37] I remember when Snapchat came out, like, Holy cow, you can’t even give me a moment to look at this. And it’s like right now, watch the video or it’s gone. You got to be kidding me. So maybe there’s some value in that, especially with the quality of said material that accompanies it. And yesterday, existing client been with me three or four years. So not a long time yet confident enough in the life insurance work that we had done, but still not a hundred percent. And I said, it’s okay. I find it’s often three to four to sometimes five to seven years that someone owns this product before they have full confidence in it, which is totally fine because it is a product they’re going own the rest of their lives.

[02:25] And when you look at all the products that you buy, I mean, how many products are like that? It’s very rare. So I love helping people think long-term. I have an identified purpose that my sister Tammy Brannon helped me clarify through her blueprint process, which people on this podcast have heard about in some form or fashion. And that is to activate life long service. So that’s obviously very long-term thinking. And it’s just a space that I really work to live in and to be in mentally and physically and emotionally and even socially and psychologically and physiologically, because I just believe that we get much better results when we apply long-term thinking to all of those aspects of our lives.

[03:21] Yeah, absolutely. So we have the opposite of long-term thinking, which is short-term thinking. And, you know, I’m going to throw out a few things on there, and then I want to tie in one other philosophy of thinking, but the short-term thinking or typically people that, and I’m saying typically is, you know, going through and maybe wanting something for nothing, lottery tickets, gambling, not putting forth effort. I’m not going to say quick wins because sometimes when we are on the right path of long-term thinking, you may experience quick wins, but it doesn’t mean that it’s always there. How else would you put a differentiator between the long-term and short-term thinking? Well, I think long-term is willing to put in the work.

[04:07] Long-term is having literally a perspective of time. And it’s funny because time is one of the most misunderstood aspects in the personal finance space. Nevertheless, it’s one of the most misunderstood aspects of all things. You know, we don’t go to the gym and get results in 30 minutes. It’s a life long effort to stay flexible and, you know, build our muscles and do other things that we would do around our bodies. Same with our food choices. It’s so easy to be swayed by whatever food is in front of us instead of knowing long-term that maybe a different choice will be more valuable. And believe me, I’m the first to eat ice cream if it’s anywhere near, but nevertheless, it is something that I realize I cannot have a diet of that

[05:02] because long-term that would make a big difference. And I think our mindsets are the same way. It’s so easy to get caught up in whatever the short-term aspect is of the moment, a quick movie story for you. I, my husband, Todd and I enjoy movies. We do not watch any TV. And there was a movie that we just saw recently. It’s called Hustle, H-U-S-T-L-E. I highly recommend it. Great family movie, clean, fabulous story, a little bit slow and almost depressing at the beginning. So here’s another example of short and long-term, right? Like we totally could have shut it off, but we were curious about it. And I won’t say too much to not ruin the movie, but they show his hands often and his hands do something when he’s frustrated and clearly thinking

[06:00] short-term and then his hands do something else as you can see him physiologically, like using his body to force his brain to adopt the long-term perspective that he needs to have right there in the middle of it. Happens to be a basketball game. And so it’s another fun example to elaborate on what we’re speaking about today of short literal, like short-term in this second versus long-term, maybe in this quarter of a basketball game, you know, 15 minutes or whatever they are versus of course, the whole game itself versus this guy’s entire career, et cetera. So lots and lots of examples in our lives about what happens when we confuse what should be going on in our mindsets in terms of short and long-term thinking.

[06:53] Yeah, you actually, that video that mentions a great piece, I haven’t seen it, but to hear that and to realize that there’s an outward symbol of it. There’s probably some, we’ll call it ticks or some little examples of things that we may do. Maybe we approach stress differently or our language changes when we’re thinking long-term versus short-term. The other piece that I want to add in is a stoic type of thinking. So the stoic philosophy is that we’re going to detach ourselves from the result or whatever that may be in some cases. Where do you put that with this long-term thinking? Well, I too enjoy some of the stoic thinking. I think a lot of it for me is a little bit too far out there, I’m guess I’m going to say.

[07:43] Nevertheless, there’s such goodness that we can learn from it and the detached from outcome in particular, that perspective that is taught in stoic thinking is one of the things that I think can be so valuable and help us adopt long-term thinking. And so just to bring it back to the life insurance example, as one way to look at it, when you put your first premium in to a life insurance policy, it immediately buys a guaranteed payout at your death. Well, good heavens, that could be over a hundred years away. You know, I love helping kids in their early twenties. They’re easily going to live to 120. So that kind of detachment from outcome is super valuable. And furthermore, that’s the death benefit part.

[08:34] Well, what about the cash value? Is the cash value super valuable in the first year of the ownership of the policy? No, not at all. You have to build it up. You have to get it going. You have to capitalize it. You have to contribute to it for a while. So here again, we’ve got the ability to say, I know I’m going to do the work. I know I’m going to make my contributions and I’m going to be detached from the outcome because I don’t know today exactly how I’m going to use the cash value as an emergency opportunity fund. I just know that in the future I can. And then bringing it again, full circle, the death benefit can be brought into our life. And I share this sentence with clients all the time.

[09:16] You can utilize your death benefit while you’re living. You just have to understand that we don’t necessarily know how today, short-term thinking, but we know that long-term and again, if you’ll detach yourself from the exact outcome, but understand that you can utilize, you’ve got a guaranteed event called death. You have a guaranteed payout called a life insurance benefit. If you know absolutely with certainty, which we do that those two things are going to come together, that’s going to impact your life shorter term. Now, not today, short-term more when you’re in your seventies and eighties, nevertheless, it will impact your life. So I so appreciate that question, Spencer, because those are aspects of

[10:00] the life insurance space that are really important and hard to get our arms around. Yeah, they are. And, you know, I think again, taking that back and I’m going to tie this into our previous episode, which we talked about the Tuttle Twins for you to distill that and the distillation, as we know, distillation is a process that takes time. And so for you to distill that shows your ability that how well you understand the concepts, the principles, how well you’ve lived it. And you’ve seen it work for many people. You’ve also seen it not work when people don’t have it set up correctly. Very true. So we’re taking all of this and I’m kind of going to surprise you a bit. We talked about it, but we didn’t add it into this episode, which is your

[10:48] long-term thinking of you wanting to help the community to be a continuous teacher, to share these principles and these concepts, you added in another way of teaching, which is a game and a workbook. So you actually showed it to me before. I don’t know if you had planned on showing it on the episode, but I think that’s really helpful because one, the long-term thinking that it took to even get it to a physical product that you hold, that’s not something that happens immediately. Well, here is our family legacy game. And this has been a year in the making. Our team came up with this idea at our last onsite retreat that we, I cannot believe how long it has taken us to get it from idea to physical cards.

[11:45] It’s a card game and it’s been a valuable process, but it’s not been easy work. You know, we are not experienced in this space. We’ve had to create and learn all kinds of new things and it’s been valuable in doing that. And I trust that the game will be valuable. So there will be a link to the game and the family legacy game. And it actually is from our perpetual wealth book, which had as a aspect of it, seven phases and has lots of fun things that go with it. We also did a workbook to go with the perpetual wealth book. So perpetual wealth book has the same with the workbook because they helped us create that. There’s great exercises for young children. There’s good exercises for teenagers, good exercises for family members to do.

[12:37] And it is all about helping people get a handle on perpetual wealth, which is of course about as long-term thinking as you can get, because now we’re talking generations, not just one lifetime, but numerous. That is so awesome. So one, you have links for this. I know this just barely came out. So if you get the links, we’ll make sure to put that in the description of the podcast. And I think on top of that, a special call to action would be for any of you listeners that use the workbook or the game, share us your feedback. Send an email to hello at prosperity thinkers.com because the feedback that you share with us helps make it better and it helps bring more people in and those, you know, we’re multiplying the

[13:24] work that we’re trying to do. Sound like a plan? Yes. Thank you so much for, and we’re so excited to hear from you, to be able to help you further. And Google reviews are helpful. Amazon reviews are helpful. Podcast reviews are helpful. That is the way of the world. That is a very short-term thing, right? Takes just a little bit, but has a very long-term impact. So thank you. Oh, what a way to put it out. I like that, Kim. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening to the Prosperity Podcast. To take control of your money and have it work for you, visit prosperity thinkers.com.