3 Ways to Plan for the (Very) Long Term

So the first: transgenerational thinking. And they all took, as a unit of measure for their entire reality of what it meant to be virtuous and good, the single lifespan, from birth to death. You're able to expand how you think about these problems, what is your role in helping to solve them. Second, futures thinking. When we think about the future, 10, 15 years out, give me a vision of what the future is. What you're probably going to see is the dominant cultural lens that dominates our thinking about the future right now: technology. The final, telos thinking. This comes from the Greek root. Ultimate aim and ultimate purpose. And it's really asking one question: to what end? When was the last time you asked yourself: To what end? And when you asked yourself that, how far out did you go? Because long isn't long enough anymore. Three, five years doesn't cut it. It's 30, 40, 50, 100 years. So it's important that we remember, the future, we treat it like a noun. It's not. It's a verb. (It) requires action. (It) requires us to push into it. (It’s) not this thing that washes over us. (It’s) something that we actually have total control over. But in a short-term society, we end up feeling like we don't. We feel like we're trapped. We can push through that.