People have been asking lately, “DC, what happened to your newsletter.” So first I rolled one out to the entire team at Drift called the TSNS aka “The Sunday Night Series”.

And now I’m bringing back my external newsletter.

Every week I’ll share one thing that’s on my mind. I’ll try to keep the email focused on sharing a habit, mental model or tool that’s easy to adopt but can provide a high degree of leverage.

Here’s what’s on my mind this week:

The Long Game

At Drift, we’re focused on building an enduring company. One of the most important steps in increasing our chances of getting there is learning to play the long game. And that line of thinking isn’t only important if you’re building a business. A long game mentality can help you achieve your own personal and professional goals.

So what is the long game? It’s something that makes sense when you think about it but is hard to actually live. This article put things into perspective.

The short game is putting off anything that seems hard for doing something that seems easy or fun. The short game offers visible and immediate benefits. The short game is seductive.

Compare that to:

The long game is the opposite of the short game, it means paying a small price today to make tomorrow’s tomorrow easier. If we can do this long enough to see the results, it feeds on itself.

The first step to the long game is the hardest. The first step is visibly negative. You have to be willing to suffer today in order to not suffer tomorrow. This is why the long game is hard to play. People rarely see the small steps when they’re looking for enormous outcomes, but deserving enormous outcomes is mostly the result of a series of small steps that culminate in something visible.

We’re all good at playing the short game, it’s easy, painless and fast. To get good at playing the long game we need to push each other to not take the shortcut, to not just default to the easiest option. We all need this help.

How are you playing the long game in 2019 and beyond?

“We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.”

– Richard Feynman

Thanks for reading. Let me know what you thought of this email and how I can make it more valuable for you. In the meantime… DG, our VP of Marketing, gave away more of our secrets (against my better judgement). You can access the very first Drift Insider course – Storytelling Secrets from Steve Jobs – here. I’m giving it to you for free. My only ask? Tell a friend who would want this too – do that here.

– DC

PS Know someone who’d want to get this email? You can share it out on LinkedIn or Twitter or point them to drift.com/dc to sign up.