How To Create A 10 Year Plan For Your Life - Gates' Law - FutureIQ

4,030 views Wait, is this logic right? • Jan 03, 2025

Slog Reference: Gates Law Make 10 year plans not 1 year plans

Description

In this video, we learn that success doesn’t happen overnight. Many people think they can achieve big goals quickly, but the truth is it takes years of hard work and small steps to get really good at something. The video talks about how we should think about our goals for the next 10 years, not just the next few months. If you keep trying and don’t give up, you will see huge results over time. The video helps you understand that patience and persistence are the keys to success, so watch the video till the very end to stay motivated and focused throughout your plan and not fall for the dips.

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Sources:
Gates' Law: https://fs.blog/gates-law/
Sahil Bloom Twitter Thread: https://x.com/SahilBloom/status/1574006862495842304
Paul Graham: How to Do Great Work: https://paulgraham.com/greatwork.html

00:00 Why Making 10 Year Plan Is Good
03:03 The 3 Biggest Mistakes YOU Make
05:50 Why Is Everyone Not Following It?
10:32 How To Stay Motivated?
11:50 How To Get Past The "DIP"
13:16 What If You Don't Reach The Goal In 10 Years
14:56 When Should You Quit?

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Gates Law Make 10 year plans not 1 year plans

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Transcript

- Shri Kant what happened to the book you were supposed to be writing writing a book is a long process na it takes a lot of time and I really don't have the time for it I want to write a book but don't have the time you are being very shortterm focused okay and you're killing your Ambitions because of that right because you are thinking oh my God now I have to put so much effort into writing but can you write two pages a week yeah of course is that a lot of work no if you write two pages a week for 10 years that's more than enough to write three books worth yeah that's that's about a th000 pages and th000

0m 34s pages is clearly George Martin George Martin 300 pages and then you revise it twice and you have an excellent book right true and that is the important thing that we want to talk about today okay that we should be making 10year plans instead we make onee plans we overestimate how much we should be achieving in that one year and then we fall short of Our Own overestimates yeah and we get unhappy yeah instead if we make 10 years plans the way our brain works is that we underestimate what can be done in 10 years so if you just keep going at a steady pace and then you look back 10 years you'll be surprised at how

1m 17s much you achieve Journey Of A Thousand Miles yes so this is called Gates law because Bill Gates uh made it popular in his uh book and he says basically that people overestimate the change that will occur in the next 2 years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next 10 years right okay so that's what we should be doing right making 10 year plans but making 10 year plans is hard na 10 years you have to commit to something for 10 years and you have to plan for 10 years and 10 years is such a long time actually you will realize that it makes things easier to do 10 year plans not harder okay for the simple reason

2m 01s that if you make a one-ear plan and because of our tendency to overestimate we end up with ambitious goals and then it is too much effort to hit those ambitious goals true so either we burn ourselves out working too hard or we give up because we haven't hit the Milestones right instead if you make 10-e plans first of all you everybody realizes that it doesn't have to be a precise plan it can be sort of a goal you can do K that you don't say that I'm going to reach that goal in 10 years you say I will follow this process for 10 years 10 years and then what it means is that on any given week the amount of work you

2m 44s have to do is Tiny right right and you just have to stick to doing that tiny bit right also you don't have to beat yourself up and once in a while if you miss one of the things to be done this week it's not a big deal it's a 10- year plan do it next week true yeah like what is 10 years and one week instead of exactly 10 years exactly right so what you're saying is not thinking of the longterm is the mistake that I'm making well actually that is three mistakes rolled into one right okay one is thinking shortterm instead of thinking longterm the related mistake is being under ambitious right not thinking uh

3m 23s big enough okay and a third related mistake is giving up too early yeah so those are the three mistakes which prevent you from achieving things and which prevent you from being ambitious now that I think about it uh this 10e plan thing could have applied to a lot of other things in my life absolutely pretty much every area of your life you can find something to do with a 10year plan right a very simple thing is just to take with jobs and careers right everybody is focused on like the first job they're going to get out of college and how much money they will make in the first year and so on right placements and they just get very worked

4m 02s up because oh my GPA is not this much and my first salary is not that much your career is 50 years right in three years out of college nobody will care about what your first job was and nobody will care what your percentage academic performance was except you yourself even you will forget after a while okay so if you think of 10 years in chunks of 10 years it becomes much better you will look for jobs that are where you learn the most okay right and in 10 years the salary will go up right that's true similarly for health you should be making 10 year plans people either will not do any exercise or when they start exercising they will

4m 50s like go overboard and then give up in a month well usually a week but yeah this hits too close to home right um uh we have an episode on the importance of networking and again people don't put effort into it because they think there is not much of an Roi to going and attending events and talking to this person talking to that person because yes you're right there is no Roi in one year you overestimate what the ROI should have been in one year correct but the ROI is there in 10 years because again you completely Miss how powerful it becomes in 10 years right that's a power of compounding that is another episode you should check out right lots

5m 31s of episode references so far power of compounding you could do the same with art Hobbies learning a language of course the internet is filled with advice on how this applies for savings right I was actually thinking of savings when I brought the point up everything everything pretty much you can think in terms of 10e project instead of shortterm if it is all pervasive why isn't everyone doing it because the shortterm really bites us okay uh it is not easy for us to think of the long term and to convince ourselves that the longterm will work out when the short term is so disappointing right uh I mean just take an example of this uh Channel itself

6m 16s right okay we actually talk about compounding and we talk about making 10 year plans and still for the first year that we were shooting uh right for the first six months there were no viewers okay almost and even now the number of viewers is very less yeah um and if we hadn't been telling ourselves again and again and again and again that this is a 10e plan we would have given up 6 months ago right but now one year in our 10 year plan we are beginning to see a little bit of an uptick it's nowhere close to what we thought we should have in one year but you know we don't know we overestimated the

7m 00s one year part of the correct and we still maybe underestimating the 10 year part so point is that even when you know everything it is difficult to convince your system one brain and most people don't even know this right so that's what we're trying to correct so we've actually dated the video by mentioning all of this and giving specific numbers and uh timelines but that's okay I guess you'll at least know how much we've been working on this channel and for this content so one problem is that the overestimating in the short term bites us hard and disappoints us and makes us feel like quitting yeah uh a related problem is that even if we make a

7m 42s 10-year plan we assume that at the end of the first year we have to achieve 111th right yeah which is not true that's not how compounding Works let's take an example okay how much can you run right now if I said you let's you become 400 m maybe 5 correct now let's say that you want to run a marathon so you want to 100x how much you can run okay let's make that a 10-e plan okay okay and you're going to assume that that means that in the first year I have to run 10 times more but that's not true the way compounding works is that every year if you just improve by 1.6 times okay okay you will still hit 100x

8m 29s by the end of 10 years okay 1.6 times in one whole year that's all as in you start running 400 every day and by the end of one year if you are only running 640 M you are on track to become a marathoner in 10 years okay right so I know a bunch of people who are extra driven and extra enthusiastic and they put in a lot of effort and they can become marathoners in two years and three years okay I'm not talking about people like them I'm talking about people like you and me who have low levels of all of those things yeah and even then we could become marathoners if we just make it a 10-year plan right all

9m 12s you have to do is 1.6 times better at the end of each year and believe me it becomes 100x at the end of 10 years I even I got confused a little I did the calculation again okay um and a related problem again is the fact that around year two and three you start thinking this is worthless this is pointless nobody cares this is not going to give me anything because that's when you are underestimating where you will be in 10 years right correct and we have done an episode on this it's important check out uh it is the dip right that's when people give up giving up at two years of a 10y year plan is one of the

9m 55s major failure modes right yeah right h so uh 10e plans think compounding and don't be afraid of the dip right and you have to keep convincing yourself because even experienced people fall for this right correct uh Blockbuster Video which used to have video rentals actual physical video and DVD rentals they didn't see how the internet and online streaming is going to change in 10 years right and which is why Netflix complet completely ate them up and Blockbuster disappeared right but you hit up on a very important point there convincing yourself to keep going for 10 years how do you keep convincing yourself especially when you are in the dip because the tip is very difficult to get

10m 43s out of yeah so uh maybe what you should do is just bookmark this video and watch it again and again no that's a good idea anyway yeah no in general that's why we kept doing a number of different episodes related to this right to remind you effort shock is the concept where we point out that everything big that was achieved took a long time and took a lot of effort right uh one problem is Media right they make everything appear to be an overnight success right and we did an episode where we talked about how even movies have this whole training montage where in a two minute song uh they will make it uh you know uh show how much the

11m 31s athlete has improved yeah so the Rocky training montage the dungle training montage all of them right so every time you see something like this remind yourself no overnight success takes 10 years and I'm at year two overnight success takes 10 years yeah that's a very interesting quote um the way to get past the dip H right is I think one pick an area that excites you okay right you feel like doing it even if you don't seems like you're making progress okay right second is make it sustainable okay so for example with your writing a book I mean if you say I'm going to write one chapter every month that is a lot of work yes if you just think of two pages

12m 19s as your target right every week that is sustainable that much you can manage the way to make it sustainable is that every unit that you do m should not be that much effort should not be so much stress for you just don't take too many breaks right breaks can kill compounding so consistency is far more important than what you do in any one unit right right so I am now on a 10 year plan to do weights gym right and I am not a weights gym kind of a person so what I lift on any given day is so ridiculous that the people around me are probably laughing at me right I don't worry about it right

13m 01s I focus on being consistent that doing the two three times uh every week that's more important because I know that in 10 years I will reach somewhere yeah you know what's been worrying me yeah what's been worrying me is that there are people who've been doing it for 10 years and still not gotten to where they want to be yes yes so you can't be dumb about this okay um just repeating the same thing over and over again doesn't help there has to be the tiny Improvement has to be there deliberate practice deliberate practice we have an episode on that but the basic idea is that you need to find some improvement second part of that is that

13m 44s we ourselves are not very good at spotting the areas that we are lacking lacking in right so someone external needs to look at it once in a while and give us some tips some ideas right okay um so uh basically other people input from other people preferably those who have some expertise in the area that you want to get good at right okay there also has to be like an UDA Loop kind of a concept there right as in you do something see how well it worked look at what needs fixing then you repeat don't do it in a stressful observe Orient decide and then act after you act again You observe M then Orient as in you

14m 31s analyze and see what worked what didn't work then you decide what needs to be done next not repeating the same thing you did last week and the week before that and 10 years ago right there needs to be a change there needs to be an up but do it without stress it's a 10e plan not something that you have to fix in a month right 10e plan compounding and consistency and Don't Fear The Dip two two more things right one is uh you know there are some are areas where you're just not going to make it right so every once in a while you should know when to quit which is basically when you stop

15m 06s making that teeny tiny progress and that's I agree it's a difficult problem knowing when you are in a dip that is going to get better and when you are in a dip that is going to remain down forever right I can't help you with that you need someone external someone experience to tell you which one of those that is sometimes it's not easy but at least you to try that yeah the episode we did on the circle of competence might help there yeah so circle of competence is also important right don't keep beating your head against things over which you do not have any influence over which you do not have any competence for over which

15m 44s you're not getting any better you're not having any effect right beating your head against The Rock for 10 years isn't going to make the rock uh break right your head will break one of them will definitely break which one breaks first is the question question but we are not going to break our heads on that question no I think the focus should be make longer term plans yeah right become more ambitious right and then use someone else some external measure to look at are you making the right kind of progress what are the areas to improve in the things that you make progress on should be changing every year yeah he's given me enough motivation to start writing one

16m 30s page a week and then incremented by one line every week I'm not no no not necessary that you're increasing just the number of lines over time you should be improving the quality also of course I will if you do it consistently quality anyways absolutely true and the most important thing to not forget is the power of compounding and if you don't understand the power of compounding check out our video that is the most important we've lined it up Shri Kant naen future IQ thanks