“You are free to choose, but you are not free to alter the consequences of your decisions.” - Ezra Taft Benson
Everything you do in the present affects your future. Everything you did in the past is what got you here right now. Your choices, no matter how big or small, have an impact of who you are and who you will become.
Since it is still impossible to go back in time to undo regrets, it is best to think of all the possible results of our actions before we do them. We must think of our actions as statements or premises that must follow a logical reasoning of why we are doing them. Asking the right questions and following them with “why” reasons will present clearer results.
By understanding the logical consequence of how one statement is related to another, we can deduce whether each statement / argument has a valid conclusion. Validity is highly dependent on you, the decision maker. While you make short term decisions, each one equals one step that is combined to create a long term goal.
This combination of steps is the result of a domino effect where one event produces similar and connected events to start as well. This effect can be both positive and negative depending on your choices. What kind of outcome do you want for your business?
How Is Short Term vs. Long Term Applied In Business?
There needs to be a balance of both “short term planning for long term success” and “thinking long term in a short term economy”. Why?
If a business only thinks of solving short term and existing issues, it will become outdated quickly and lose the right timing of creating growth and new possibilities. But if a business only thinks of the long term of creating new products, new services, and new clients without maintaining the existing ones, the business will eventually lose all credibility and funds since it has been spent uncontrollably. The main idea here is control.
For better control, a business must be able to “simultaneously think of a plan while making improvements”. A company must think in terms of essentialism and remove activities that do not currently add value. Why? Because if it does not work now, why would you think it will magically work in the future?
Every time a bad strategy is removed -- you make room for new strategies to take its place because a business can only handle so many actions at a time. Every end of something is a new beginning of another. Continuously applying and testing strategies or premises hastens the evaluation process and increase benefits while reducing sunk cost. Why would you want to continue investing your funds, time, and sanity on methods that do not reveal your desired results?
However, every new strategy does take time to spread and gain momentum. It is really dependent on your business on the length of time it will take to show any results. Again, it is a balancing act of patience and knowing when enough is enough.
How Is Logical Consequences Related To Web Development?
For websites, every action a user does equal multiple steps or functions simultaneously called in the background to output the user’s desired results. Each result comes from the developer’s thinking strategy to figure out the kind of feedback to return to the user if they did something right or did something wrong. Both right and wrong have to be defined depending on the conditions that the client wants.
Unlike in the real world, making the wrong choices in websites or web applications can be prevented with feedbacks that come from try-catch exception methods and validations. In turn, before users press submit or send button, they already made the required changes to their inputs so that the outputs do not include any errors.
If some validations are missing and bad data gets stored in the database, sometimes this results to a hack where it will eat up your server resources and your entire host will crash. Or worse, all your user’s privacy information is breached and collected for … who knows what.
The key to short term decision making for positive long term result is prevention. What parts do you want to lasts and end? How many risks can you handle and give up to reach equilibrium? Are you prepared to face all the consequences of all that you do? Why or why not?
