Quotessence
Home / Topics / Short Term Quotes

Short Term Quotes

Browse 415 quotes about Short Term.

Related topics

Short Term Quotes

“[Clayton] Christensen had seen dozens of companies falter by going for immediate payoffs rather than long-term growth, and he saw people do the same thing. In three hours at work, you could get something substantial accomplished, and if you failed to accomplish it you felt the pain right away. If you spent three hours at home with your family, it felt like you hadn't done a thing, and if you skipped it nothing happened. So you spent more and more time at the office, on high-margin, quick-yield tasks, and you even believed that you were staying away from home for the sake of your family. He had seen many people tell themselves that they could divide their lives into stages, spending the first part pushing forward their careers, and imagining that at some future point they would spend time with their families--only to find that by then their families were gone.”

“Interest in temperament as an individual difference dimension of importance in one's behavior leads to reanalysis of both theoretical and methodological considerations relating to the construct.”

“As a species, we haven’t evolved to plan 20 years into the future. As a rule, our decision-making is myopic, shortsighted, and lacks imagination. We’re heavily incentivized to seek rewards in the present, which can greatly cost our long-term Future Selves. [If you don't] think and strategize long term, [you'll be distracted by the short-term.] You’ll be caught up by endless distractions throughout your day. Your decisions will be myopic. You’ll cost your Future Self greatly, putting them deeper in debt in all ways.”

“Truly in the short term, there tends to be no consequences to our act of irresponsibility. However in the long run most of those kids we refused to pay attention to are now grown ups and are the fearful nocturnal visitors with weapons attacking the same neighbourhood, raping our daughters and wives, maiming our sons and husbands, turning our lives into a nightmare. Our response? Another blame game.”

“It is easy to underrate how long it takes to implement a new idea. Researchers estimate that it takes 30 years for a groundbreaking development to progress from initial idea to a commercially viable product. Middle management often extols the value of short-term strategies that react to market circumstances. Kodak used short-term strategies to keep its analogue photography business going. But the expression 'short-term strategy' is in fact an oxymoron, because trying to reach short-term goals is not strategic by definition.”

“Because we’re disconnected from our Future Selves, we opt for near immediate goals or dopamine hits. This short-term seeking ends up costing our Future Selves big. [Example of this, from comedian Jerry Seinfeld] Late at night, I think, “Well, it’s night, I’m having a good time, I don’t want to go to sleep. I’m Night Guy. Getting up after five hours’ sleep? That’s Morning Guy’s problem. Let him worry about that. I’m Night Guy, I’ve got to party.” Then you get up after five hours of sleep, you’re cranky, you’re exhausted. Night Guy always screws Morning Guy.”

“There are guys who grow up thinking they'll settle down some distant time in the future, and there are guys who are ready for marriage as soon as they meet the right person. The former bore me, mainly because they're pathetic; and the latter, quite frankly, are hard to find. But it's the serious ones I'm interested in, and it takes time to find a guy like that whom I'm equally interested in. I mean, if the relationship can't survive the long term, why on earth would it be worth my time and energy for the short term?”

“I don't think that Mitt Romney can legitimately say that he learned anything about how to create jobs in the LBO (leveraged buyout) business. The LBO business is about how to strip cash out of old, long-in-the-tooth companies and how to make short-term profits. All the jobs that he talks about came from Staples. That was a very early venture stage deal. That, you know they got out of long before it got to its current size.”

“There's the part that I just want what I want, and I don't want to be bothered by anything else, and sort of the short-term more compulsive self. And then that's the longer-term, aspirational self that wants to be informed about the world and wants to be a good citizen. The best media basically helps us strike a balance between those two things.”

“Well, I am a great believer in supercompensation. Short term overtraining leads to long-term success. I can hear the complaints about injuries, but, in truth, not too many of us suffer injuries that lead to surgery, according to those studies in the 1950′s. In fact, if you are not a druggie and have some common sense, I think you can afford to train harder than you think.”

“The environmental crisis is somber evidence of an insidious fraud hidden in the vaunted productivity and wealth of modern, technology-based society. This wealth has been gained by rapid short-term exploitation of the environmental system, but it has blindly accumulated a debt to nature-a debt so large and so pervasive that in the next generation it may, if unpaid, wipe out most of the wealth it has gained us.”

“The greenhouse crisis is the bill coming due for the Industrial Revolution. It's not an accident. It's the logical outcome of our world view - the idea that we can control the forces of nature, that we can have short-term expedient gains without paying for them, that there are no limits to exploitation of the environment, that we can produce and consume faster than nature's ability to replenish.”

“The hippies had in mind something that they wanted, and were calling it freedom, but in the final analysis freedom is a purely negative goal. It just says something is bad. Hippies weren't really offering any alternatives other than colorful short-term ones, and some of these were looking more and more like pure degeneracy. Degeneracy can be fun but it's hard to keep up as a serious lifetime occupation.”

“Self-interest and mutual interest are inextricably linked. National interests can best be advanced through collective action, ... Calculate not just the human misery of the poor themselves. Calculate our loss: The aid, the lost opportunity to trade, the short-term consequences of the multiple conflicts; the long-term consequences on the attitude to the wealthy world of injustice and abject deprivation amongst the poor.”

“I believe that you and I - and everyone we'll ever meet - has the inborn capacity to be heroic, to take daring, courageous, and noble steps to make life better for others, even when in the short term it seems to be at our own expense. The capacity to do the right thing, to dare to take a stand and make a difference, is within you now.”