This past weekend was the final regular season weekend in the NFL. While the measure of the season’s success or failure for many teams depended on them winning their games, for many others, that measurement was not so clear.
The way the NFL works, the teams with the worst records get the first choice in the next draft of incoming college players. So, for teams whose seasons were already failures, winning their last game meant nothing, but losing that game could get them a better player for next year in the draft. What to do? Is it better sometimes to lose in the short term for the sake of winning in the long run? I think so, and I think more people should do it.
Some teams have no ethical qualms over this whatsoever. The Philadelphia 76ers “tanked” in successive seasons in order to obtain better draft choices and build their team. It worked. They’re pretty good now.
But, I would extend this process beyond sports. I have a friend, for example, who claimed to have perfected a long term seduction technique. When he met a woman he wanted, he did not come on strong. To the contrary, he came on weak. Just maybe a friendly hello at first. Then these approaches would gradually be ramped up over time – a brief conversation (always about her, never about him); later a slight touch (first the hand, then later the arm, then later the shoulder); then a show of sympathy for a problem she was struggling with; and so on until a date and, ultimately, consummation, was inevitable. This took him a long time. Could his goal have been achieved sooner if he had tried to win her immediately? Maybe. But the unrequited steps along the way made his long term success more likely. And the delayed gratification only sweetened the pot.
Long term thinking should also be applied to business. Can you imagine what would happen to a CEO who proposed to the Board that the company would be better off losing money for a while so he could implement a well thought out plan of research and recruitment for the future? Would he make it back to the office before he was canned? But, would that suggestion be so intolerable, so beyond reasonable consideration?
We are too wedded to short term analysis. Political candidacies live and die by daily polls. Stocks rise and fall on minute by minute news reports. We can’t even look far enough ahead to pay sufficient attention to global warming. After all, it was chilly this morning.
The way we live now, we should change the country’s motto from “e pluribus unum” to “what have you done for me lately.”
There are a lot of things we can learn from sports. One of them is that while “living for today” might make for a good poster, “living to fight another day” might be a lot more practical.
We were right 