I had the honor of meeting Dan Coughlin at the Association of Fundraising Professionals Arizona Statewide Conference in 2008 in Tucson. We have been using some of Dan's concepts with nonprofit organizations, and subscribe to his newsletter to see what new gems he can share. Here's an excerpt from his latest article which we think applies to many in the nonprofit field, reprinted with permission. The full article is available at http://thecoughlincompany.com/cc_vol10_7.html (Thanks, Dan!-Alice)
Why
Shortcuts Ruin Results by
Dan Coughlin
People
are often categorized into groups by things like their gender, race,
height, year of birth, and nationality. Then all sorts of assumptions
are made about each person based on their combination of these
labels.
Those
labels mean nothing to me. They don’t tell me anything about the
individual because the individual had no choice over any of them when
he or she was born. Each person was just given those labels.
What’s
vastly more interesting to me is whether the person is a short-term
thinker or a long-term thinker. Each person gets to choose which of
these categories he or she is going to operate within.
A
short-term thinker focuses on doing whatever he or she can do to get
a good short-term result. The short-term thinker idolizes shortcuts.
Shortcuts are fast ways to get really good results, but that are not
capable of producing good results consistently over the long term.
A
long-term thinker focuses on doing things that will generate good
short-term results on such a consistent basis that the long-term
results are good as well. The long-term thinker realizes you can’t
get poor results all of the time in the short term and expect to get
good results over the long term. The long-term thinker abhors
shortcuts because he or she knows they breed habits that can’t
sustain success.
This
is such a subtle difference between short-term and long-term thinkers
that it may seem insignificant. However, the ramifications over time
are undeniably dramatic in every area of life.
