Quotes About Long-term

Real results come from putting your momentary needs on hold to pursue larger, more important goals.

Well, strategy. The competitive landscape. Morale. The dynamics of the executive team. Top performers. Bottom performers. Customer satisfaction. Pretty much everything that has a long-term impact on the success of the company. Stuff you just can't cover in weekly or monthly meetings.

It is a bad thing to be in a recession, and a good thing to recover, but one should never confuse the rapid growth that takes place during a recovery with an improvement in the economy's long-term performance: once the economy is near capacity, growth is bound to slow down. Moreover, recessions and recoveries depend far more on the Federal Reserve than on the administration in power, and happen to Republicans and Democrats alike.

The basic proposition that the "Krugman calculation" was meant to convey is that income inequality has been increasing so rapidly that most families have failed to get much benefit out of long-term growth. This proposition stands. One need not take seriously the efforts by supply-siders to chop the past fifteen years into little slices, and claim the good ones while disclaiming the bad ones.

What should you do? Become an investor with a time horizon greater than one year (the emphasis is on "greater"). Give your investments time to grow.

In the long term everyone traffics in foregone conclusions, and in the short term they just get drunk. This is the way it has always been. Some half-assed ambiguity masquerading as mystery is all anybody's really looking for.

There are risks and costs to a program of action but they are far less than the long range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.

Marketing of art is, and to my mind has always been, trendy. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean there is any real long-term value. As an artist I do what I like. As a collector I collect what I like.

The attitude of unconditional self-acceptance is probably the most important variable in their long-term recovery.

An overly pragmatic attitude is not productive on the long run.

FOR LONG-TERM DREAMS (FOUR TO TEN YEARS) Once you get to dreams that are going to take you more than four years to save for, you should really consider putting your dream-basket money into growth-oriented investments. Because you've got more time, you can afford to take more risk to get a bigger return. To my mind, that means investing in stock-based mutual funds.

Most successful long-term relationships share similar traits. Having worked closely with hundreds of couples, I've noticed over the years what the really strong ones have in common. They recognize the vital importance of patience and compromise. They possess common values and goals. But perhaps most striking of all, the really solid couples, the ones who seem happiest and most fulfilled, all seem to have dedicated their lives together to some greater purpose.

with the way the world is now, we all have to think about things beyond our lifetime. Beyond our children's lifetime, in fact. It's our right. It's our duty, my good friend told me.

So the criminals win, that's what you're saying? For now they do. But it's a long game, Jamison. And I always play for the long game.

If you want to perform well over both the short and long term, pay close attention to executive leadership in general. As much as you might invest in areas like culture, process transformation, and M&A, you'll only make progress if you have talented senior leaders who are both committed to the company's strategies and capable of executing on them. Having the right number of those leaders matters too.

Great leaders, I came to believe, challenge themselves and others to understand their businesses better and rethink them so that they can achieve two seemingly conflicting things at the same time. That same intellectual discipline—that mind-set of rigor and curiosity—allows leaders to master what is arguably the most important conflict of all: attaining strong short-term results while also investing in the future to achieve great long-term results.

In challenging other leaders intellectually, I strove specifically to push them beyond the incrementalism that usually exists inside organizations—the tendency to consider the short-term implications of a decision exclusively and to ignore the long term.

One of the most important tasks of any therapist is to help depressed patients find the courage and determination to resist and fight these hopeless feelings. This battle is often fierce and rarely easy, but nearly always rewarding in the long run.

By operating in the institutional mainstream of short-horizon, uncontroversial opportunities, committee members and staff ensure unspectacular results, while missing potentially rewarding longer term contrarian plays.

The investor with a long-term horizon begins with a portfolio composed entirely of risky assets. Then, as the investor's investment horizon contracts, the investor moves assets from high-risk to low-risk positions.

Sensible investors take great care to minimize the tax bill associated with moving assets from the high-risk, long-term portfolio to the low-risk, short-term portfolio. Although the tax code introduces many complexities to investment decision making, as a starting point consider moving taxable long-term assets to the low-risk portfolio, thereby allowing tax-deferred holdings to continue to receive shelter from taxes.

Passive market timing consists of inadvertent deviations from long-term targets caused by the action of market forces on the values of a portfolio's various asset classes. Whether caused by an investor's active decision or an investor's passive indifference, market-timing returns result from deviations between hypothetical target portfolio returns and actual portfolio asset class returns.

Three basic investment principles inform asset-allocation decisions in well-constructed portfolios. First, long-term investors build portfolios with a pronounced equity bias. Second, careful investors fashion portfolios with substantial diversification. Third, sensible investors create portfolios with concern for tax considerations. The principles of equity orientation, diversification, and tax sensitivity find support both in common sense and academic theory.

Table 4.1 Equities Generate Superior Returns in the Long Run Wealth Multiples for U.S. Asset Classes and Inflation December 1925–December 2005 Asset Class Multiple Inflation 11 times Treasury bills 18 times Treasury bonds 71 times Corporate bonds 100 times Large-capitalization stocks 2,658 times Small-capitalization stocks 13,706 times Source: Ibbotson Associates, Stocks, Bonds, Bills and Inflation, 2006 Year Book.