Scott H Young

You will save a lot of time, energy and stress if you stop worrying about things that aren’t important. Don’t waste your energy on things that won’t make a difference in five years. While the idea of ignoring the unimportant seems great, it can be tricky to put into practice. Many of the things that don’t matter, feel incredibly important. How do you separate the critical few from the useless many?

I’m in a great position to be able to look backwards. I keep a journal. Instead of writing out daily events, I use it as a tool for problem solving. As a result, I have a written record of the tricky problems I was dealing with for a period of years.

Looking back in time, it’s amazing how few of the problems I devoted a lot of thinking and energy to, really mattered. A good percentage were problems that didn’t matter two weeks later. Most wouldn’t matter after five years.

The Five Year Rule

After having this observation, I came up with a little rule that helps me put things in perspective. The rule is this:

Will I care about this five years later?

If the answer is no, the problem isn’t important. If doing nothing or working hard on this activity will make no difference in five years, it isn’t important.

I’ll admit, five years is fairly arbitrary. I could have said one year, ten years or when you’re on your deathbed. The time span doesn’t matter as much as the principle. If the effects of an activity has a short half-life, it isn’t important. Even if the activity feels crucial at the time.

This doesn’t mean tasks that only have a six month or two year half-life aren’t worth doing. It just means they should be considered relatively unimportant tasks. Being relatively unimportant, they shouldn’t steal energy from the actually important.

No Impact Versus Incremental Impact

If I don’t go to the gym one day, that isn’t going to make a noticeable impact in five years. By this reasoning, going to the gym isn’t important and I shouldn’t bother with it. For those familiar, this is the Zeno’s Paradox equivalent of time management.

Work that has an incremental impact, however small, should still be considered important. Small investments are better than nothing. While you might not have the chance to make life-altering decisions every day, you can still build towards something that matters. Look at the direction of an activity over time, not the impact of an individual unit.

Cleaning Your Project List

Look through your list of things to do. Put a check mark next to those that will have a genuine impact five years from now. Not things you will remember as being important, but things that actually change the quality of life in five years.

My guess is that there aren’t many things you can put a check mark next to. I’d predict that most of the few things you do add check marks to, will turn out not to matter. There are so few genuinely important tasks, that it is easy to let your energy get eaten up by trivial, urgent activities.

How You Can Apply the Five Year Rule

There are three ways you can apply the five year rule:

1. Stop worrying about the tasks with a less than a five year half-life.
2. Eliminate the tasks that won’t matter in five years.
3. Find the tasks that do matter, and focus on those.

The first strategy is easier to put in place than the second. Just catch yourself when you spend too much energy stressing about something that doesn’t matter. Stop yourself and try to focus on something that does. Focus on one of the things you did put a check mark next to on your list.

The second strategy is a good idea if you’re constrained. If you don’t have time to do everything, you should start dumping the tasks that have the shortest half-life. Get rid of the things that will cease being important the fastest.

Above all, you should be using your five year time line as a guide for where to put your energy. If you’re twenty right now, try to estimate what you’re going to care about when you’re twenty-five. You can’t be perfect, but you can use this as a template to separate the few that matter from the many that don’t.

A great deal of self-improvement advice is based on one principle: if the cost of failure is low, taking action and making mistakes beats doing nothing. This isn’t motivational hype, it’s common sense. If the upside is great, and the downside is minimal, why not roll the dice?

Unfortunately, few people actually ask themselves what the worst case is. It requires extra attention to actually visualize a realistic worst case scenario. Until you can see the worst case clearly enough to write it down, you won’t be able to follow through on the above advice. Any push towards action will seem more like faith and blind optimism than logic.

I believe there is merit in actively finding the realistic worst case scenario. By turning on the lights in the darkest part of your plans, you can see if any monsters really exist.

Is the Worst Case Acceptable?

There are few places where failure is free. Starting a business can take a considerable investment. Writing a book might take you over a year. Quitting your job to work on your passion might force you into lower paid work. Even if failure doesn’t cost you anything, it can still bruise your ego.

You shouldn’t try to find places where failure is free. Just places where the cost of failure is acceptable to you. Losing your initial investment, wasting a year writing a book or switching to lower paid work are all consequences. Can you live with them?

When I do this exercise with most of my projects the answer comes back yes. I might not enjoy failure, but I’m not going to die. Bob Parsons, founder of GoDaddy, once retold advice his father gave him before he went into business: “Robert, at least they can’t eat you!”

Your Worst Case Needs to be Realistic

I once had a conversation with a friend about dating. I suggested that, if in doubt, you might as well be forward. What’s the worst that could happen?

He explain that, on top of the sting of rejection, he could have pepper spray shot into his eyes and have awful rumors spread about him, forever ruining his social life.

Now it’s easy to understand why you would be a little gun shy with that mental picture hanging over everything you do. If your worst case is highly improbable, you probably shouldn’t consider it. A bus has a non-zero chance of hitting me when I cross the street, but that doesn’t mean I should sit inside all day.

What if the Costs are Unacceptable?

Sometimes you’ll reach decisions where the costs of failure are genuinely high. They might not be life-threatening, but they keep you from rushing in. If you needed to put up a hundred thousand dollars of your own money before starting a project, the “fail fast” mantra doesn’t really apply.

In these cases, I usually try to see what I can do to make the worst case less damaging. Generally this means:

• Shortening the project timeframe. A 3-month failure isn’t as painful as a 3-year failure.
• Lowering the investment amount. Bootstrap and use a smaller budget.
• “Ratchet” the decision. Start with a smaller version of the decision and slowly expand, so that you can get out early if failure seems inevitable.

Usually costly projects can be made more bearable by some combination of those three approaches.

Moral Versus Personal Consequences

One thing that can stop people from acting on decisions is that the costs may be acceptable to them, but not to the people around them. Take a few examples:

• You want to start a business, but this might lower your income. You’re fine with less money, but your family isn’t.
• You aren’t sure whether to release early. You’re fine with not getting sales, but your customers might not like a defective product.
• You want to take on a position of greater authority and responsibility. You’re fine with embarrassment or possible punishment if you can’t handle it. But the people you’re responsible for are not.

I believe, as a rule, you should try to shift as much of the costs over to yourself. Personal consequences can be a lot larger to be acceptable, since you pay the price alone. It can be harder to make decisions which have moral consequences on the people you care about.

In situations which do have side-effects for the people around you, the approach needs to be (a) reduce the worst case as much as possible and (b) shift as much of the worst case onto yourself.

Imagining the Best is Easy, Knowing the Worst Takes Work

It’s easy to daydream about the best-case scenario. It’s harder to know the most likely worst-case scenario. But if you can do both, and accept the worst-case, you can have confidence that your motivation is based on common sense.