There’s an old joke whenever two politicians get together.

This is usually when one guy is thought to be “smart” while the other is thought to be “stupid.”

Of course, we all think our guy is smart, and the “other people’s guy” is stupid.

This can apply to any two politicians, from any point in time.

Anyhow, the way the joke goes is “guy A is playing chess, while guy B is playing checkers.”

Meaning one guy is only thinking in the short term, while the other guy is thinking many, many moves ahead.

Being able to plan far out into the future is a very good trait to have. This requires that you not think of ONLY what’s in it for you now, but what might happen tomorrow or a week or even a month from now.

The problem is our instincts are designed to look only a few moments into the future.

It’s been said that “being civilized” simply means planning on a more distant future, rather than relying on our instincts, which can only think of the future right in front of our faces.

This isn’t easy, it isn’t natural and it definitely takes practice.

This is thinking behind Benjamin Franklin’s famous statement, “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.”

Our instincts our telling us to stay up late and sleep in. But if we can overcome our instincts with conscious planning, (sleeping and waking up early) we’ll be much more likely to make something of ourselves.

Here’s another way of looking at it.

If you’re only focused on the near term future, you have a kind of tunnel vision. But if you are focused FAR out into the future, you can see a lot more things. A lot more paths. A lot more opportunities. A lot more options that you might have otherwise missed.

But here’s the cool thing.

Part of you is ALWAYS looking WAY out in the future. That super genius part of you that operates BELOW your conscious  awareness. That part of you that is ALWAYS playing a VERY LONG RANGE game of chess, while our conscious minds are always playing checkers.

Unfortunately, that super genius part of us can ONLY speak to us in intuition. Feelings. A gut level hunch that tells us we should maybe choose option B when our short term checkers brain is telling us option A is best.

When you tune into this part of you, magic will happen.

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