Extending yourself through time

A builder's guide to the long-term (or: learning the right lesson from people like Kati Kariko)

Katalin Karikó, 2023 laureate of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. © L'Oréal Foundation. Image via https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/katalin-kariko-becomes-fifth-woman-receive-nobel-prize-after-winning-loreal-unesco-women-science

One struggle of ambitious people is that their ambitions exist on long time horizons, with a lot of upfront costs to be paid today for the chance of success that might come years or even decades later.

You want to build a startup? First commit yourself to an indeterminate stretch of hyper-intensive, chaotic, uncertain work for which you bear total responsibility, in hopes that someday you might enjoy the reward of having built something new—and get remunerated accordingly.

You want to become a doctor? First incur massive debt and obligate yourself to thousands of hours of intensive study and years of anonymous apprenticeship, so that someday you can practice as an autonomous physician—and get remunerated accordingly.

Why do we put ourselves through this? And when does it even make sense to do so?

Why, for instance, did Kati Kariko spend all those decades working in underpaid, low-status academic research jobs at Penn while failing to get a single grant funded for her mRNA research? Was she selflessly martyring herself for the sake of a future in which her research might save lives, as much of the media coverage has portrayed?

Here’s how she answered this question in her Nobel Prize interview:

“People judge me unsuccessful, when I felt very successful—because in the laboratory I was in full control of doing experiments and getting questions asked and then getting the answers… of course you never get the answer because when you do an experiment you get more questions instead of the answer, but this is what [was] exciting…”

Of course, she would not find this process nearly so exciting absent the promise of eventual answers:

“What is exciting is that there is a complexity, and then it is you who can solve it by reading articles or doing experiments and put together things which maybe nobody did. Then you realize what’s going on. The joy that you were the first one to know that this is how things happens… It is very similar to be like a detective or an investigator on a crime, but the end of it, you don’t find a perpetrator, you find a solution, and maybe that solution would help somebody.”

What Kariko describes here is a far cry from the sort of thankless grind that often gets ascribed to people like her. She is not “trading off the present for the future”, any more than she’s myopically focusing on the present at the future’s expense; she is living her one exciting, richly purposeful, delightfully suspenseful investigative life. This, I submit, is an exemplary yet poorly understood way of relating to oneself through time. This post is a download of my understanding of it to date. 

Rewards—by what measure?

The banal answer to the question “when and why should we prioritize the long-term?” is: when we believe the value of the future outcome will outweigh the current costs. Supposing we do believe this, there are plenty of tactical tools to help us manage the current costs without giving up or burning out: set incremental goals; celebrate progress; reward yourself periodically; make time for rest and self-care; use mindfulness apps to practice present-moment awareness when you can, so you’re not just “living in the future” all the time; etc.

But most people don’t struggle for lack of such tactics. They struggle because they have no clear metric for evaluating whether “the future outcome will be worth more than the current costs” in the first place. How many years of poverty is a medical degree or an $N million startup exit worth? Are dollars really the best currency in which to measure the value of one’s time? And is one’s time worth more or less in one’s 20s versus one’s 40s?

To be able to answer such questions in a credible and enduring way, we need a more radical paradigm shift. From thinking in discrete sequences of current costs and future rewards, we need to recognize instead that our life is all one thing—one extended, 90ish-year interval (pending further updates from the life extension folks) of iterative creative activity. Our past and future are not just coextensive; they are inextricable parts of one long, winding, complex, unified epoch. This is why I argue that “your life as a whole” should be the fundamental yardstick by which you make decisions.

Once you apply this yardstick in earnest, a lot of the difficulties associated with short- versus long-term tradeoffs either dissolve or become a lot more solvable.

Integrating the future into the present

There can be no real conflict of interest between “present you” and “future you” once you come to see, clearly and deeply, that it is really all the same you.

This is easy to see over a short enough time course and for straightforward enough causal contingencies. For instance, if you happen to know that a certain type of sweet-tasting berry will cause hours of stomach pain and throat constriction upon swallowing, you’re unlikely to experience the prospect of eating such a berry as a “tradeoff”: the whole idea will repel you. In fact, once you come to recognize the berry’s sweet taste as the harbinger of soon-to-be physical agony, you’re unlikely to enjoy that taste even in the moment, given your knowledge of what it’s doing to you.

Nor would you relish the suspense of a good mystery novel or TV series if you knew it would never get resolved; nor would you find joy in walking down the aisle if you didn’t think your marriage would last beyond tomorrow.

In each of these cases, your understanding of the future is literally part of your experience in the present. Your “present self” extends as far into the future as your mind can vividly project. In fact the very concept of a “present self” is an abstraction from the concept of a “self,” which we only form once we have some conception of a relatively stable identity that persists in some way through time. 

The challenge, of course, is that this vivid future projection gets harder the farther out in time, causal complexity, and probability distribution you go. Rationally projecting the implications of what we choose to eat or how we choose to spend our time today for how our lives will be going 5 or 10 or 50 years from now is an incredibly complex mental exercise. But the default is not simply a blithe unawareness of the fact that we have a future and that our present actions will contribute to shaping it. Rather, the default is that our projections are vague, unchecked, and fraught with contradictions. Perhaps we’ve internalized a bunch of conventional formulas, like “junk food will kill you” but also “you only live once,” or “no pain, no gain” but also “you need work-life balance,” and we feel constantly torn between these conflicting mandates, none of which we fully understand or endorse with respect to the specific life we’re trying to build.

By contrast, the secret behind some people’s ability to persevere through years or decades of “delayed gratification” is not that they are better able to suppress the “shorter-term” mandates in favor of the “longer-term” ones; it’s that they’ve gone beyond generic mandates and formed an integrated conception of the life they’re living. They’re not martyring their present-day selves for the sake of a remote, impersonal future, as some might assume; rather their day-to-day experience is infused with that future and what it means to them in the present.

The most “persevering” founders I’ve worked with can see with their mind’s eye, and feel in their bones, the compounding cost of every inefficiently-spent hour for their company’s long-term revenue growth. And they care about revenue growth, not as a generic metric they’ve been taught to care about because their investors and other founders seem to care about it, but because of what it specifically means and enables for them: be it the widespread adoption of a beloved product they’ve poured their heart and soul into creating, or the validation of their leadership practices, or the chance to sell their company and build something new. And they care about that desired future, in turn, because of how it will extend what they love—and, yes, vindicate what they hate—about the work they are doing today.

The awareness that they are building that desired future is part of what makes the present-day work more enjoyable than grueling, even when it looks necessarily grueling from the outside. 

Sacrificing the present to the future is not “normal”

This means that, if you’re struggling to envision and stay inspired by whatever future you’re building, this is not “just what happens” to ambitious people. It’s a real problem to be solved. The solutions may include any combination of changing the goal (along any of multiple dimensions), changing your present-day experience of the goal (along any of multiple dimensions), or both. Maybe you need to flesh out and clarify your vision and the steps required to get there, or do a better job of reminding yourself of these on a day-to-day basis. Or maybe the solution is to pivot to a different vision or project or line of work altogether. 

One implication here is that, if you want your life to go well, you generally need to pursue activities whose value is emotionally real to you in the present, at least much of the time—even (especially!) if that value will take many years to materialize. It’s not enough to see value in the future outcome, which could be true of any number of future outcomes you hope someone will bring about someday; you also need to see value in being the one to enact those outcomes. If you don’t enjoy the work involved in creating your desired future, or at least take great personal pride and satisfaction (which are, after all, forms of enjoyment) in being the one to create it, you’ll inevitably burn out or default to a sort of passive martyrdom. Then it won’t be the disciplined pursuit of a desired future, but the avoidance of present-day guilt and shame that compels you forward. 

Even supposing you do, in principle or partly, see genuine value in a long-term goal, there are countless variables affecting how well you’re able to keep that value emotionally real to yourself day to day. Some have to do with the nature of the goal (e.g., how far out in time, how complex in scope and sequence, how dependent on what sorts of hard-to-predict externalities, how incremental versus like a step function, etc); others have to do with the activities required to achieve the goal, and the extent to which you love or could come to love (or outsource or find viable alternatives to) those activities; still others have more to do with your psychology (e.g., how well you can maintain focus and resist distraction, how anxious or even-keeled you are temperamentally, how clearly and deeply you understand the causal interdependencies involved, etc). Crucially, you have at least some agency over many of these variables—and it’s fundamentally up to you to decide which ones are worth solving for. 

If you’re someone who enjoys depth over breadth and does not love the constant whiplash of navigating steep learning curves, you’re likely better off working in industries that leverage your existing expertise. Not everyone has (or need have) the character of a Blake Scholl, whose pivot from e-commerce to supersonic airplanes was powered by his distinctive passion for rapid ascent in learning as in altitude. 

Likewise, for a founder who does not do well with projecting and maintaining conviction in complex long-term futures—or who simply wants to get liquidity and shift his focus to family and travel within the next 5-6 years—this might mean choosing a startup idea with a relatively quick path to revenue and market capture, versus a deep tech or pharmaceutical product that will take years to develop and test before it even hits the market. 

This might sound like an oblique critique of overly “mercenary” founders, but it’s not. There’s nothing wrong with such shorter-range projects: they can integrate well into a life led long-range, and they’re the better course for many builders, given their values and personalities. In fact I am one of them. I chose to double down on my private practice as a coach and therapist, and to put my academic research career largely on the back-burner, in part because the feedback loop between effort and results is vastly quicker and more direct when working with clients versus waiting on academic journals.

So does this mean you shouldn’t go into academia or pursue an ambitious long-term startup mission unless you’re a delayed gratification savant?  Not really, no. When I think about the happiest, most fulfilled academic researchers I know, the difference between them and me is not primarily in their superior ability to project and savor the satisfaction they will someday feel upon analyzing and publishing the results of the study for which they are currently trying to get grant funding. It is that they love the whole academic research enterprise far more than I do—including, inextricably, both the day-to-day experience of participating in that enterprise and the gradual accretion of knowledge toward which that day-to-day experience adds up. They are like Kati Kariko.

This doesn’t mean academics like Kariko or my happier university colleagues don’t still get annoyed by many aspects of the job. But even for the most annoying tasks, like grant-writing, they find much to delight in: like searching Google Scholar for prior findings related to their proposed study, crafting a robust and compelling study design, or consulting with colleagues about what measures and hypotheses to include. I know, because I’ve loved many of these aspects too, at times. I loved them partly as a function of my studious nature (which I’ve now channeled into different, less formal modes of research), and partly out of an implicit belief that they would add up to something ultimately valuable—and not just “valuable” in some impersonal sense, but valuable in the context of my life and what I wanted to be doing with it.

Only once that conviction started to waver—largely as a function of discovering how much more and faster I could learn through my therapy and founder coaching work—did I begin to experience academic research as a grueling exercise in delayed gratification. The Google Scholar searches and study design brainstorms I once relished began to feel like pointless wheel-spinning, since part of me knew there was no empirical finding, old or new, that could magically justify what I’d already concluded was an inferior use of my time. So I deployed various self-regulation hacks to “keep myself moving” along the default academic track—for the roughly 3 more years it took to finally admit to myself that I wanted off.

Perhaps, if I had different colleagues and mentors or a different profile of strengths and weaknesses, I could have mapped out a complex, decades-long vision for an iconoclastic academic research program that would, in time, position me to develop a more robust body of theoretical and applied knowledge about the psychology of ambition than I can achieve on my own. Or perhaps the current institution of academic psychology is just an inherently poor fit for those goals. Whatever the explanation, my decision would be the same.

Critically, though, most of the academic researchers I’ve encountered have no more clear and compelling a vision of the ultimate value they’re creating than I had. Instead, most of the “gratification” they seek comes in the form of journal acceptances, promotions, pats on the back; empty social signals that, unsurprisingly, just leave them hungry for more.

The same is true of many founders and investors I encounter in the private sector, though the empty social signals take slightly different forms.

Vast optionality—bounded by a few core truths

As we’ve seen with Kariko, the sort of person who does great long-range work enjoys (much of) it in the moment. They're not just torturing themselves for the sake of a distant future someday to be achieved. And we should aim to enjoy (much of) our work as we're doing it, in the here and now. But to really do this, we can't embrace the Zen-master approach of only living for the present. Because part of a good (and enjoyable) present for a human being is an orientation towards the future one is creating.

To understand the need for such an orientation, we must grapple with some broad, inescapable facts about human nature and the human lifespan. One such fact is that we are mortal, and our time on earth is finite. Another is that we survive by building—and building anything takes time. More than that, it takes planning and enacting a complex sequence of steps to bring about the existence of something we need or want in the world: be it a Lego tower, or a cup of coffee, or a company, or a family, or a well-lived life.

The moment-to-moment meaning of a specific act of building is conditioned by the broader, longer-range context. One’s experience of that meaning is conditioned by one’s sensitivity to that context.

Many of the things that contribute to a fully-lived human life—an education, a career, a community, a home, a healthy mind and body—take somewhere on the scale of years to decades to build. Our values and desires are (rightly) complex. They naturally tend in this direction, because, as noted, your life is one thing. Building towards it involves engaging in stochastic processes, the accretion of smaller steps and wins, and growth and movement at the medium biological timescales that dominate the human condition.

It’s not that there are no short-term wins; it’s that, again, the short-term is given meaning and context by the long-term, by the course of your whole life, and not just the other way around. 

That said: just how far into the future you need to be able to project, and at what level of resolution (from “I’ll be working on something that interests me” to “I’ll have cured this specific form of cancer”, for example), depends on the nature of the projects and goals you want to pursue—and, most broadly, the kind of life you want to lead. 

For instance, if you want to have kids, you’ll need to devote a considerable portion of time over roughly 18 years of life (counting from the youngest kid) to parenting them, plus do some planning in advance to ensure you’ll be able to acquire the resources and support you need (which themselves will vary widely depending on what’s important to you: spending lots of time with your kids? Showing your kids by example just how much is possible to make of one’s life? etc). 

If you want to experience the financial and personal rewards of a highly specialized skillset, this will likely take some years of dedicated, low-paying work and study to learn, but the upsides can be tremendous (and the learning itself can be an absolute thrill, insofar as it’s connected to the real work you want to be doing and the future upsides remain real to you). The level of confidence you need in a decision before committing depends on whether the project is a “one-way” or “two-way” door, what opportunity costs are associated with it, and so on.

There’s vast optionality in how you plan for and relate to your own future. But some amount of planning and relating is inescapable, if you want your life to go well. 

Before you sign up for a given long-term project, you need a conception of the project as a whole—including both the range of likely outcomes and the likely time, energy, resources, and activities it will involve—and envision your life with versus without it. This is inherently harder to do for some projects than others, depending on the complex causal contingencies and externalities involved. But the extent to which you’ll need to do this sort of modeling—and the extent to which you can either already do it or are eager to learn—should itself be part of your mental model. At some point you may need to ask yourself, for example: “just how vividly and credibly am I projecting this future and the path by which I’d get there? If not very, is there anything that could help me do this better? Are there people I can talk to who’ve successfully traversed this path? Internships or smaller projects I can do that would give me a better taste of what’s involved? And how much time and effort do I want to invest in figuring this out, versus choosing a path that’s already more legible to me?” 

Once you have an adequate mental model, you can make an informed decision about which version of your life you want more.

It is valid to say “I’m willing to pay the price of X mission or goal,” and it is also valid to say “I’m not.”

What doesn’t work is grudgingly half-assing one’s way toward a mission or goal about which one has never honestly asked that question. Yet this is many people’s default. 

Finding person-life fit

A couple months back I listened to an incredibly inspiring episode of Invest like the Best featuring Sam Hinke, the former basketball executive who started his own venture capital investment firm, Eighty-Seven Capital. Here is how he answered Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s question about his choice to pivot to this career and how he has designed it for himself:

“I think in decades by nature. Like, where's this thing going? What are people thinking about? What are the second and third-order effects to this shift that we're seeing here? And I want there to be leverage on that kind of thinking, not momentum trading for this week versus next, but leverage on trying to see around the bend. And then lastly, some of this is a we call a personality quirk, I think, which is I'm super steady, sometimes annoyingly so. I'm hard to fire up. I don't mind being alone in my opinion for a very long time. Can you get to a place where that kind of steady temperament is rewarded, and build an ecosystem with that kind of trust, where people say yes, we too believe in this kind of approach and that we can first slowly and over time with more and more leverage turn this wheel that generates the things that you're interested in?” 

Part of what I love about this response is that it shows a self-awareness—and active leveraging—of the fact that many of these traits are peculiar to Sam, rather than reflecting universal human virtues. That he has a relatively even-keeled temperament, that he naturally “thinks in decades,” that he loves 1:1 conversations with brilliant people (the one feature on which I can particularly relate)—these are personal attributes that make him especially well-suited to investing, whereas they would not be as well-suited to the constant task-switching and rapid iteration that, say, a founder must do. 

So yes, you can build yourself a life like Sam Hinkie’s; or you can doggedly pursue your passion for a single idea, like Kati Kariko; or you can follow your curiosity where it leads and then “connect the dots in retrospect,” like Steve Jobs; or you can master a complex skillset that allows you to provide for a vital human need, be it via medicine or accounting or sports or food preparation or software development; or you can be an artist, or a craftsman, or a homemaker, or a Renaissance (wo)man, or a community-builder, or any of the countless forms and combinations of well-lived lives that have been and have yet to be conceived. 

Choose with the knowledge that almost any choice is better than a default on choosing, and that most choices (with some obvious exceptions) are two-way doors. 

But choose with full awareness that what you’re choosing, what you’re building, is a life; your life. It’s never just “this moment,” or “this job”, or “this relationship”; it’s a point on your timeline, an inextricable part of this one precious, singular span of existence you get to design. So if you find yourself conflicted between “present you” and “future you”, the solution is not to sacrifice either one to the other; it’s to solve the underlying design problem.

Such problems are eminently solvable—and your life, present and future, depends on solving them.