When we start to think long range it changes the way we approach life. It changes the things we buy. When my wife and I saw this principle we stopped buying a bunch of cheap, plastic toys for our kids and started to buy better quality toys that our kids could use and that could last for our grandkids to use.

A business person is often thinking 5-10 years down the road. I spoke with one individual in the USA who had built a significant number of chicken houses on a farm. He and his partners will be using the proceeds to pay off their capital investment in the construction for the first 9-10 years of operation. After ten years however, the construction cost will be paid and it will turn into a highly profitable and lucrative investment. But you have to be able to see ten years down the road to get there.

In conversation with another business man who had started multiple businesses, I learned another application of thinking long term. He stated that when he was first starting a business he never kept track of the amount of hours he put in because it wouldn’t make sense to put that many hours into a business with the minimal initial return. The return came in the years after as the business got off the ground and started to generate returns on a larger scale. This insight helped me when we started the property rental business and there was a lot of initial start-up work required in the first few years. I was OK putting the extra work in to get it off the ground so that it could yield rewards for many years.