What is your long-term game? That's the question I want you to ask yourself during today's episode and when you're doing your planning, when you're doing your journaling, when you are reflecting on your quarter, on your week, on your career. What is your long-term game? I've missed a few weeks here for a couple of personal things that were going on with our family, and part of me struggled with this question during this short break. Not a struggle of whether or not I would keep on doing the show, because I do think that the show is going to be a little bit more of a struggle. It's going to continue. But rather, I felt a sense of conflict having missed a week. From my recent memory, I don't think I've missed a week of the show in the over eight years that it's been going. Now, the reasons that I missed recording were certainly valid, so I didn't feel conflicted about the choice itself. Rather, I felt a sense of dread that somehow this break would cause the entire thing to fall apart. That you, as the listeners, may choose that the show has no longer provided the value that you once got from it because of this break. Now, of course, the rational side of me can recognize that a week-long break in a podcast's history is not a good thing. It doesn't necessarily signal that everything is falling apart and things are on fire. In fact, a week-long break of just about anything probably shouldn't signal that at all. The truth is, some of this was actually about me trying to clarify that long-term game. What is the long-term game for this show? What is the reason that I continue to come back to this microphone? Is it just habit? Or is there actually something that I care about doing over the course of many years? The second is true. It rings true internally for me that I would return to this show as I do on a weekly basis with the intent of helping other engineers find clarity, perspective, and purpose. That really is the reason this show exists. It's not. It's not to get a certain number of listeners. That's a secondary thing. Helping engineers comes by way of having engineers listening. And so reaching an audience gives me the opportunity, statistically speaking, to actually achieve that mission of helping other engineers find clarity, perspective, and purpose in their careers. That's what I care about. Doing and finding more engineers that I can help is an underlying goal. It's a means to the end. And so because of the incentives that are attached to that number of listeners, for example, I can actually get paid by sponsors if I have enough listeners. Because of the incentives attached, it's easy to forget that the long-term game, the short-term game, is different than the short-term game. This is very important. This is the whole message I want you to take away today. We often think about a long-term game that we want to win in, but then we strategize for the short-term. We aren't thinking about the overall scoreboard. We're thinking about the next play that we're going to run. And if the next play fails... Or if somehow we have a setback in that short-term game, we imagine that it's a signal of failure. The truth is, the long-term game requires patience. It requires that we recognize failure as a likelihood. Statistically, at least. We're going to fail from time to time. We're going to have moments where our short-term game is off. So here's what I want you to do. I want you to think about this question. Pick an area of your life. Pick a distance. A long-term game is not a week long, and it's not a month long usually. It's going to be a year long at least. Typically. It's possible that you're going for a six-month or three-month long, and you may be able to call that a long-term game. But really, we're talking about the pathway that you're taking. All right? The pathway to fitness. The pathway to getting the role that you want or saving a certain amount of money. Whatever that pathway is. As an engineer, this may be a pathway to engineering excellence. Being able to sit through pretty much any leak code that's thrown at you and succeed. That might be a long-term goal that you have. I want you to think about what would indicate success. What is the scoreboard for your... What is the scoreboard for your long-term game? What is the scoreboard for your long-term game? Because the truth is, if you're counting how many successful plays you have, the scoreboard very rarely indicates the successful number of plays. Think about this for a second. In the game of American football, a given team may win, but have a very low number of completions. How is that true? How is that possible? Well, it may be that every completion they get, they have a star receiver who can outrun everyone. And he's always running to the end zone. But the number of plays they run, the number of unsuccessful plays may eclipse the number of successful plays. Similarly, you may have absolutely no star players on the team, but you have a series of consistent small steps. And so, your short-term game is highly correlated with your long-term game. And your number of successful plays then turns out to be highly correlated to your success on the scoreboard. But the important factor is that they are not always tied. What is the scoreboard in your long-term game? It's important to understand this and differentiate it, importantly, with the scoreboard for your short-term game. Your short-term game is the scoreboard for your long-term game. Your short-term game is metrics that might tell you that you're on the way. It may be behaviors that you care about. It may be habits that if you screw one of those up, you didn't necessarily impact the long-term at all. An example of this, the scoreboard for your long-term game tends to be outcomes that you care about. If you are on the path to fitness, then your scoreboard for your long-term game might be a scoreboard for your long-term game. It might be a number on the scale, or it might be a certain number of minutes that you want to finish a 5K in. It may be a certain amount of weight you want to lift. That might be your long-term game scoreboard. But your short-term game scoreboard is going to be about what you do today or this week. It might be that you consistently put in the effort that you cared about putting in this week. Your short-term game may be correlated with your long-term success. But it might be a number on the scale, or it might be a certain number of minutes that you care about putting in. But it doesn't necessarily mean that you will be successful. And so, when you think about the effort that you're putting in without seeing results today, perhaps you are looking for long-term game impact with your short-term game inputs. Let me say that again. If you are trying to affect the long-term, an example of this is that you are looking for a long-term game. At the end of the day, you may have taken the long-term gameijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijij It's something that will work, but you have to do it for a much longer time. You may be playing a short-term game of buying stocks, investing, but you're very unlikely to become rich from one investment. It's a habit, a requirement that your short-term game be strung along. The long-term game does not change quickly. So here's the caution I want you to pay attention to today. This particular pairing of making a short-term investment and looking for a long-term impact, making a short-term investment and looking for an immediate effect, however small, on that long-term impact or a long-term scoreboard, that long-term game, this is demoralizing. It can cause someone who was previously misled, motivated, the reason they went to the physical therapist or the reason they implemented that code, that testing suite in their code base, is for the long-term. That was their motivation. And so the intuitive connection they're trying to make sort of makes sense. I do this thing and the output is an improvement on the long-term game. But the truth is so much different. The red flag I want you to take here is when you start to feel like your motivation is disappearing because the long-term is not improving. Your long-term game scoreboard isn't getting any better. Now, imagine that we're going back to the American football example of this. If we measured whether or not a given play was successful, right? Here's very important. A given play was successful. If we measured that based off of, only the long-term scoreboard, if we said the only way that we can tell if a given play is successful is if it scores or not, then we're ignoring the other variables at play. For example, how exactly do you define a good play? In this very reductive version of what a good play is, then it must end in a score. But the truth is that a not very good play is not a good play. It's not a good play. It's not a good play. It's not a good play. It's not a good play. It's not a good play. It's not a good play. A good play could end in a touchdown. And an excellent play could end in yards lost even. A perfectly executed play could end with the offense at midfield, right? So the point is, there are more variables to take into consideration during the short game. So you need to do two things. This is absolutely critical. Two things that you have to do to protect yourself from the situation. Where you throw in the towel, even though you're doing the right things. Okay. That's, that's what we're trying to avoid here is quitting too early, even though you're headed in the right direction. And this happens to companies, by the way, it happens at an organizational level. A company tries to make a change. Maybe they make an agile transformation and then their planning is harder in the next round while they throw in the towel because agile was supposed to fix their planning and they give up, right? This is a premature decision because they're looking at long-term. So they're trying to make a change. And they're trying to make a change. And they're trying to make a change. And they're trying to make a change. And they're trying to make a change. So you have to make two adjustments. The first adjustment you have to make is to change your feedback mechanism. This is a very simple, conceptually very simple idea, but not always so simple in practice. If we, for example, set up our criteria for what a successful play is in American football, we might say total number of yards gained, or maybe we even measured that play over the course of many iterations. So we know that this is a good play, but in this particular case, the defense was ready for it. Well, it doesn't necessarily mean that we made a bad choice. So make sure that you refine your feedback mechanisms. Refine them so that you can actually determine whether what you're doing is actually a good thing to do. We can inform that on the front end by recognizing best practices, using things like base rates to make reasonable decisions with the information that's available. But we also want to have a good play. So we can actually determine whether or not a good play is a good play. So we can actually determine whether or not a good play is a good play. So we can actually have some kind of feedback from the decisions we're making that is relevant, that's germane to the short game. The second thing to recognize is that the long-term game is won not through motivation, but through determination. The long-term game is won by discipline, by patience. It's not won by a sudden spurt of energy and going and trying to do one good thing. The long-term game requires consistent and dedicated investment. The feedback that you receive on both the short-term game scoreboard and the long-term game scoreboard, those should serve mostly as steering. We want to use the short-term game to steer our actions today or in the near future. We want to use the long-term game scoreboard to recognize when those cumulative actions have actually resulted in some kind of success. So we can actually determine whether or not a good play is a good play. So we can actually determine whether or not a good play is a good longer impact. But we don't use those as fuel. We don't use them to instruct whether we keep going or not. Our determination and our patience, those are the things that keep us going. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Developer Tea. I hope you enjoyed this discussion on long-term and short-term games and their associated scoreboards. Hopefully this is helpful to you. If you thought it was helpful, share it with somebody. Let somebody else know about this show. You can find the community of people who are listening to this podcast and talking about it together. Developertea.com slash discord. It's an excellent community to join. If you are interested in this kind of topic, it's totally free for you. It will always be free. Please come and join us. Developertea.com slash discord. Thanks so much for listening. And until next time, enjoy your tea.