3 ways to plan for the (very) long term | Ari Wallach

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 24 October 2017

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We increasingly make decisions based on short-term goals and gains -- an approach that makes the future more uncertain and less safe. How can we learn to think about and plan for a better future in the long term ... like, grandchildren-scale long term? Ari Wallach shares three tactics for thinking beyond the immediate.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This TED Talk features futurist R.E. Wallach, recorded live at TEDx Mid-Atlantic,
0:13.3	2016.
0:17.2	So I've been featuring, which is a term I made up, about three seconds ago. I've been futuring, which is a term I made up, about three seconds ago, I've been
0:23.5	futuring for about 20 years. And when I first started, I would sit down with people and I say,
0:30.2	hey, let's talk 10, 20 years out, and they say, great. And I've been seeing that time horizon
0:37.0	get shorter and shorter and shorter.
0:40.6	So much so that I met with a CEO two months ago, and I said,
0:44.5	we started our initial conversation.
0:46.5	He goes, I love what you do.
0:48.2	I want to talk about the next six months.
0:52.7	We have a lot of problems that we are facing.
0:56.1	These are civilizational scale problems.
1:00.0	The issue, though, is we can't solve them using the mental models that we use right now to try and solve these problems.
1:08.0	Yes, a lot of great technical work is being done.
1:11.7	But there's a problem that we need to solve for a priori before if we want to really move the needle on those big
1:18.4	problems. Short-termism. Right? There's no marches. There's no bracelets. There's no petitions that
1:25.3	you can sign to be against short-termism.
1:28.2	I tried to put one up and no one sign. It's so weird.
1:33.9	But it prevents us from doing so much.
1:37.2	Short-termism, for many reasons, has pervaded every nook and cranny of our reality.
1:42.8	So I just want you to take a second and just think about an issue that you're thinking, working on.
1:48.2	It could be personal, it could be at work, or it could be Move the Needle World stuff,
	...

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