The Key To Success

“The key to success is to spend more time on important-yet-not-urgent activities than most of your peers.”

I wrote this sentence in my latest book, “Winning Long-Term Games.” The idea is that everything that matters in the short term is urgent, but in the long term, you will forget the urgent tasks you worked on, and everything that will have mattered are the important-yet-not-urgent activities, such as building skills, trust, or relationships.

Of course, it is important not to take this to any excess. Of course, you cannot fully avoid working on the urgent. And often, important tasks are also urgent. Yet, the point remains. Unless you spend at least part of your time working on important-yet-not-urgent activities, you will find yourself unable to grow beyond a certain point.

But why is it so hard to work on the important-not-yet-urgent?

The naive answer would be that, similarly to the marshmallow test, it’s about delayed gratification. However, unlike the marshmallow test, you are not alone in the experiment room. Instead, all around you, others are eating the marshmallow, and the media are celebrating those who eat it the fastest. It turns out that the hard part is not delayed gratification but the feeling of falling behind.

In particular, the hard part is the feeling that, if today you didn’t get out of the day as much as someone else did, then you’re falling behind, and you should catch up as soon as possible. This is a dangerous belief because it will make you feel bad every day you don’t produce as much as others, and every day you don’t party or vacation as hard as others. As a result, you will feel like you have no time to work on the important, be it important for your professional life or your personal one.

If this is your bottleneck, here are two things you can do about it:

Carefully select who you spend time with or follow online. Remove those who constantly make you feel like you're falling behind, leaving you frantically trying to catch up while neglecting the important-yet-not-urgent.

Whenever you work on something important-yet-not-urgent, such as building skills, relationships, or trust, immediately give yourself a big pat on the back. It is crucial that you feel like you have made progress; otherwise, you will revert to spending all your time on the urgent.

By all means, none of these are necessary. But if you examine how you spent the past week and notice that you neglected the important-yet-not-urgent, you might want to try putting them into practice.