Long Term Success vs. Short Term Success

In having a email discussion on Facebook with Karel Mc Intosh in Trinidad and Tobago, the topic turned to categorization. The context was related to Staring Back Through The Lense, Part I, but in 3 messages got into the 'Life, Universe and Everything' category. I won't write about the Caribbean tagging of blog posts, because I believe that the horse race has started with all the dead horses having ignored the starting gun.

We were actually talking about how we measure success, and I had put it into the context of weblogs before I wrote Karel and said I needed to kick it around. In truth, I think I still do need to kick it around some more, but here is the question on my mind:

In a world where everything happens faster, are we as a species focused more on short term success than long term success?

This initially caught me in a tangle of James Gleick's Faster and Steve Talbott's Devices of the Soul: Battling for Our Selves in an Age of Machines, with a lot of muddy water in between. This is a typical problem of reading broadly, I suppose - the muddy water in between.

When we talk about a website, how is it that we judge the success of it? Is it the revenue that it generates? Is it the material that it contains? Is it the ranking that the site gets in search engine rankings?

How does one judge the success of a book? A class? A category? Businesses are fortunate in that a business plan gives someone a clear idea of what would be considered success - and yet, is a company that produces books and makes less money more successful than a company which produces addictive substances and makes healthy profits? Suddenly, we're dancing on the line of philosophy and, perhaps, religion. The truth is that 'success' is as subjective a word and concept as 'value'. Are they linked? Is value a requirement for success?

I would hope that value is a requirement for success. I would hope that someone who is considered successful is also valuable - but how does one judge whether a person is successful or valuable? Is it the amount of invisible dollars stacked in a silicon bank account? Is it the amount of money that they give away, allegedly as philanthropy? Is it wiping the tear from a child's eye? What is success?

Lots of questions, but now and then there is a need to ask these questions. Any idiot can, for example, create a website that aggregates information from around the world - in fact, many idiots have and many idiots will. It isn't a new idea; the technology has changed. To be fair, some good things come of this - think of National Geographic. Those aren't idiots. What makes, as an example, a 20 year old National Geographic magazine valuable? Is it that the information in it, archived away in some hidden place, has some wealth of information that is useful? Or is it instead that the value is that someone else wants it, making it the equivalent in exchange as any other commodity - be it toilet paper or issue one of Superman?

16.9% of us on this planet are connected to the internet. Since August, 1991, the internet has been around. In that time, we've increased the amount of information on this vast network to include projects such as the Wikipedia - and in doing so have brought forward old practices of building bureaucracies which are increasingly indefensible. It is a fact of life that bureaucracies fall under their own weight over time, no amount of chewing gum will keep everything in place. So we have done some wonderful things with this internet, right? Can you name anything which mankind has truly created of value with this new tool? The last 20 years almost seem like reruns that have been technologically adapted - sort of like digitally remastering the old stuff. It is not to say that through becoming more connected that we are not capable of doing things which we could not do before... but there are still 60 minutes in an hour. There are still 24 hours in a day. And if we measure how much we do in a day, how would it weigh against what our forebears did 100 years ago? Was what they did less or more important than what we do now? Were they more successful than they were? Are we?

These are not new questions for me. These are very old and very familiar questions with increasingly complicated answers as I grow older, and more importantly as the things I love grow older - some die. I own a screwdriver that is more valuable to me than this computer, and even the house where I presently lay my head. I'd rather buy a book than a beer, and I'd rather have a few close friends than a social network which includes internet-connected civilization. But these are personal values which I do not expect anyone understand.

The values which I wish more people understood are in my email signature:

Criticize by creating.
-- Michelangelo

The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine.
-- Nikola Tesla

The future is where the true value is - and not the immediate future. It is the future of generations unborn that matter. When you look around... how much do you see that has that sort of value? Now for the tricky part.

Categorize it.