Omar Usman – Playing the Long Game Sam Kyle 3 Things I Learned

The worst feeling

is when you put a lot of work

into something

and you get some benefit, you get a

win, and then in the long run it

ends up being a loss. We've all felt

that before, and we've all heard that phrase,

the operation was successful

but the patient died.

Sam Kyle calls this a Pyrrhic victory,

and his book Playing the Long Game

talks about the mindsets needed to overcome or

to prevent having a Pyrrhic victory. And so

in this video, I'm sharing 3 things I

learned from playing the long game by Sam

Kyle.

The first lesson is to skate to where

the puck is going. That means not being

caught up in the same place where everyone

else is, but anticipating

where the action is going to be. In

order to do that, that requires vision. It

requires being able to see a couple of

steps ahead of everybody else.

It requires patience to execute on that vision,

and it also requires a strategy in order

to get there. Now when people play the

short game, they're playing the same game as

everybody else, and they're trying to get those

same small wins as everybody else.

But the problem when you focus on the

short game is that there's a much higher

cost of failure. So if you put all

your eggs in the basket of what we

can immediately get right now, if it doesn't

work out, the stakes are much higher. But

when you play the long game, if you're

skating to where the puck is going, so

to speak,

a short term setback isn't as catastrophic.

When you play the long game, that cost

of failure gets is much lower.

The challenge, of course, is that playing the

short game is a lot easier and there's

more immediate satisfaction.

Think about something like consuming

information over social media versus sitting and reading

a book. One has immediate gratification,

but the other one we know is more

useful and more beneficial in the long run.

The primary challenge to skating where the puck

is going is that if you've been playing

the short game for a long time,

changing

requires a lot more effort. For example, if

someone's been accustomed to eating junk food, then

it's going to be much harder to eat

healthy food. That healthy food is going to

taste bland,

it's not going to have all that extra

salt and sugar, and so it's not going

to be as satisfying when you eat it,

even though you know in the long run,

it's much more important for you to have

that. So the resistance to

change is much stronger

when you're playing that short game.

The second lesson I learned is that consistency

is the most important element of playing the

long game. We've all heard all of the

cliches.

Eating an elephant starts with one bite, the

journey of a 1000 miles begins with one

step, Rome wasn't built in a day, and

so on and so on and so on.

And these cliches have a powerful element of

truth.

No matter what that long term goal is,

you have to chip away at it consistently,

and when you consistently do something day after

day, you start to build momentum.

And one thing that Sam Kyle will point

Sam Kyle points out in the book is

that

momentum

can be more powerful than even big wins

in some cases, because a big win might

give you a sense of satisfaction. You might

take your, you know, take the pedal off

the gas,

but consistency

that builds momentum keeps you going even on

the slow days, and over time, over the

months years, there's a huge compounding

effect that leads to disproportionate amount of results.

Also,

because we live in a society where speed

has become such a premium, speed has become

such a value.

It used to be that patience was the

ultimate virtue, and Kyle says in the book

that, now speed has overtaken patience as the

ultimate virtue. So if we take that idea

that you're probably familiar with the zig when

everyone else zags, you get a competitive advantage.

Well, in a world where everyone is valuing

speed,

there's a competitive advantage to being patient

and being consistent.

The third lesson I learned is the idea

of second order effects. Now that's a fancy

way of saying the consequences of the consequences

of your actions. So for example,

you know that if if you buy something

that you can't afford,

you get a short term win or a

first order consequence, which is that you're able

to buy something

that you want to get.

The second order consequence or the consequence of

the consequence is that over time, you may

end up paying a lot more money in

interest payments. So there's a lot of situations

where there's a short term benefit,

but in the long run, you have that

pyrrhic victory. Right? You end up having a

larger cost in the back end, that second

order effect is negative. And so the key

becomes, how do we avoid those second order

effects?

The first thing is to understand

that first order effects and second order effects

are often the opposite. So that means in

order to play that long game and get

the the bigger payoffs

at the end, it might mean that you

have to do some more painful things in

the short term.

If we take that example of social media

again, there's a first order consequence of engaging

with content,

connecting with people, you know, consuming all this

useful stuff,

but there's a second order consequence that we

sometimes don't think of when it comes to

our ability to focus,

problems with attention spans in the future, even

issues with mental One thing that he mentioned

in the book that I found to be

particular particularly interesting

was the idea that the person who is

a superior thinker

is the one that know that can best

accurately predict

the cons the first order and second order

consequences.

So the one that's able to cast the

best vision and understanding of the long term

effects

of a certain business strategy, of a certain

plan, of a certain project, or a certain

course of action.

The one that can best predict those second

order consequences

has the most superior mental model or way

of looking at things and making sense of

them, and adds the most value to a

team or to an organization.

And so by focusing on that second order

effect,

you prevent that Pyrrhic victory

where it looks like you got a win,

but it ends up being a loss. So

hope you enjoyed this video. Please make sure

you like, subscribe, and please leave a comment.

I'd love to hear your thoughts. What's an

example of a long term win that you

got that you were forced to maybe take

a short term loss? Please share that in

the comments. See you in the next video.