Creating A Legacy Mindset
Jonas Salk solved the problem of polio for us when he along with his team developed a vaccine for polio. Even though he was hailed as a hero, he was not interested in fame and fortune. All he wanted to do was to leave a positive legacy for future generations. He was being a good ancestor and we cannot thank him enough for this. Salk’s whole philosophy of life was focused on one single question ‘Are we being good ancestors?’
The problem with human beings is that we are not well designed to think beyond a few days or months in the future when we must be thinking in centuries beyond our lifetimes. We prefer smaller and sooner rewards than a larger one later. Short-term thinking has brought us to a point where we face an existential risk where many experts think that there is a one in six chance of a total wipeout of humanity in this century.
As humans, even if we can extend our thinking by a few decades instead of focusing on the immediate present, it would open up plenty of optionalities. Take a simple example where most of us end up taking a mortgage the moment we become eligible for it. We buy a home without thinking about opportunities that may arise on the other end of the city or across the country.
“Life is too short for short-term games. We only have so many years for long term games to compound”
Lots of scientists, writers, and other creative thinkers have taken initiatives to help humans extend their temporal imaginations beyond a few decades. In 1977, two voyager spacecrafts with golden records containing the sounds of earth were sent into space. These spacecrafts were designed to last a billion years. The space crafts have travelled beyond our solar systems as I write this post. In another endeavor, Jonathon Keats installed a camera in 2015 in Tempe, Arizona, to take a 1,000-year-long exposure of the city’s skyline. Memory of mankind is another interesting project that aims to create an archive of all the best content from the current century and is designed to last a million years.
We humans have a choice about how we want to play our cards. The simple choices like avoiding smoking, staying fit, eating well, avoiding anger can go a long way in improving our long-term chances of survival. Same goes with investing. You need that rare skill of extreme patience to create a snowball of wealth at the end of 50 years. This is possible through dollar-cost averaging into the index or actively managing it.
How to start thinking in decades or in centuries? Create a legacy mindset. Ask yourself what kind of legacy would your ancestors want you to leave. Simple decisions like planting a tree or reducing your carbon footprint can leave a long impact on the future generations. Another mental hack would be add a zero every time you write the current year. For example, when you write today’s date, instead of writing 27 May 2002, add another zero and write 27 May 02002. All we need to do is take small steps towards improving our future.
