Short run vs Long Run Goals

It is often hard to break down one's own motives into a temporal schemata that gives priority to your decision (both real world decisions and those made over the boards). One is often left at the chessboard searching first for ANY plan and then only secondarily evaluating if the plan is performable. It is a vexing question to try to apply such techniques at the chess board but even harder when tries to apply them broadly to their own life. It is important to keep your goals spread out over time... in chess as in life.

I find it easier to break this argument into three parts. 1) Defining and clarifying your own short term goals. 2) Defining and clarifying your own long term goals. 3) Find the cohesive that runs them together.

Your short run goals should always include things like happiness, fun, enjoyment and satisfaction cause you never know if you will live to see your long run goals completed. I see all too often players that join a tournament, lose their first game and withdraw. If their only goal was to go undefeated then both their short run and long run goals have been lost with this victory. Otherwise, this withdrawal makes no sense. If you long run goal is improvement and your short run goal enjoyment... first the tournament, enjoy the games and study the loses! This method is the only one to achieve your aims.

But your long run goals should contain a more oriented, rhythmic logic such as concrete ways you achieve your short run goals. If you derive satisfaction from wins then you must learn how to improve your practical winning chances. Some are just happy to show up and play the game.

What I am talking about here is chess terms can be clarified in the short term as more wins, more rating points, more money but in the long run... overall improvement. The difference between the chessboard and your life is your might translate rating, wins to simply money and fame. Job Title, promotion, something to hold over a highschool classmate, a family member a friend. As Ayn Rand stated succinctly in the Fountainhead, it is okay to desire such things if they are the means leading towards an end. It is natural to want money if it leads to certain luxuries... it is not natural to want money just because other think it desirable. I feel in this ground most of us become lost. It is the same in studying chess openings where one will endless copy and memorize GM moves and games without understanding their plan and their short run goals. You copy because you know their long run goal is to win the game. But if their short run goal was just not to lose? You can never know the circumstances under which the artist creates so it is better to understand the lesson then to follow blindly. Goals are something that should be achievable, identifiable and desirable.