Another question to ask yourself is "is this question the right one to ask?" It could represent a false dichotomy.
As animals we're built for a fast effort/reward loop. Look at most people and how they operate -- they desire immediate gratification.
Something that makes us special is the ability to push out that loop and make long term plans. Not everybody is able to do that.
I can count, to the specific decisions, among my friends, what things they decided to do in their lives where they had a choice of a long term plan that would have yielded great fruits, or a short term plan yielding immediate gratification (but with long term problems stemming from that) that ultimately ended up with them being impoverished, without health care, unable to get better jobs, save up for retirement, etc. As an external actor I know exactly where they made those decisions and what they chose instead.
But I can't really blame them or think less of them for how they ended up in their circumstances. They are simply acting the way we as animals are built -- they are acting normal.
In every case, I believe that the difference between a long-term planner and an immediate gratification fixer is willpower.
Doing something like what many people do here, starting up a company, takes extraordinary long term planning - it's not normal. A simple observation of large groups of humans shows that it's abnormal behavior. It takes mountains of willpower in most cases since we don't see the immediate benefits of what's likely hundreds or thousands (or tens of thousands) of hours of work. The payoff, if there even is one, is an abstraction that even the smartest and most dedicated can have trouble using to reconcile their labors.
What you can try to do instead is find clever hacks to reduce the friction it takes to get a task done. For example, reduce your problem into very small steps. That way you feel a faster reward for your labors -- even if it's just the feeling of accomplishment at getting another step out of the way. Use lots of small arrows pointing to your goal instead of one big one.
Or try giving yourself an explicit reward for making small milestones, something proportionate to the magnitude of the step. Eat at a favorite burger joint, or hike a favorite trail, or watch a movie you really want. Whatever floats your boat.
You might even try a program of personal denial, don't allow youself to have certain pleasurable things unless you make a milestone. Pull at both ends, the "work hard play hard" system.
In other words, make the effort/reward loop as small as possible to help keep you motivated. This is especially important during tedious/grinding parts of your work that are often mistaken as burnout when in fact they're just boring and you're really desiring a reward at the end of it.
As animals we're built for a fast effort/reward loop. Look at most people and how they operate -- they desire immediate gratification.
Something that makes us special is the ability to push out that loop and make long term plans. Not everybody is able to do that.
I can count, to the specific decisions, among my friends, what things they decided to do in their lives where they had a choice of a long term plan that would have yielded great fruits, or a short term plan yielding immediate gratification (but with long term problems stemming from that) that ultimately ended up with them being impoverished, without health care, unable to get better jobs, save up for retirement, etc. As an external actor I know exactly where they made those decisions and what they chose instead.
But I can't really blame them or think less of them for how they ended up in their circumstances. They are simply acting the way we as animals are built -- they are acting normal.
In every case, I believe that the difference between a long-term planner and an immediate gratification fixer is willpower.
Doing something like what many people do here, starting up a company, takes extraordinary long term planning - it's not normal. A simple observation of large groups of humans shows that it's abnormal behavior. It takes mountains of willpower in most cases since we don't see the immediate benefits of what's likely hundreds or thousands (or tens of thousands) of hours of work. The payoff, if there even is one, is an abstraction that even the smartest and most dedicated can have trouble using to reconcile their labors.
What you can try to do instead is find clever hacks to reduce the friction it takes to get a task done. For example, reduce your problem into very small steps. That way you feel a faster reward for your labors -- even if it's just the feeling of accomplishment at getting another step out of the way. Use lots of small arrows pointing to your goal instead of one big one.
Or try giving yourself an explicit reward for making small milestones, something proportionate to the magnitude of the step. Eat at a favorite burger joint, or hike a favorite trail, or watch a movie you really want. Whatever floats your boat.
You might even try a program of personal denial, don't allow youself to have certain pleasurable things unless you make a milestone. Pull at both ends, the "work hard play hard" system.
In other words, make the effort/reward loop as small as possible to help keep you motivated. This is especially important during tedious/grinding parts of your work that are often mistaken as burnout when in fact they're just boring and you're really desiring a reward at the end of it.