The Long Game Is Everything

Take your time.

I am in the process of losing my place as the “young guy” in the room.

Since I was hired to LifeWay Christian Resources as a 22-year-old in 2013, I have long enjoyed being the token young person in many, many professional settings. I’ve appreciated that role, and I’m sad to see it go. But as time slips through my hands and gray hairs appear, my perspective on work and life has begun to shift for the better.

When you’re a young professional, speed and the immediate are everything. Or at least they were for me. I think the youthful zeal that is the blessing of your 20s helps you take the bull by the horns, ignore risks, and do whatever it takes to get things done. Again, I am only speaking from my experience here, but I think this makes sense more broadly, too.

At the same time, when you’re a newly-minted graduate, perhaps a newlywed, and the youngest person in most of the meetings you’re a part of, it can be hard to have a long view of things. When I was 22 and 24 and 27, I was much more concerned about how to improve and optimize my work in the immediate than I was in how to set myself up best for the long term. 

This is changing, and I think it’s just one of the fruit of no longer being the “young guy.” 

I’m 32-years-old now. I’ll turn 33 in October. I am no longer the young guy. And that’s okay! I don’t mind. Especially because with maturity has come an appreciation for the long game. 

The long game comes up in every aspect of my life these days. It is the theme of my parenting. It is the theme of my writing strategy an author. It is the theme of my day-job. 

Simply put, to care about the long game is to be willing to forsake immediate results for better long-term progress. It requires patience. Let me share a couple of examples I’ve come across in the video game and content creation space in just the last couple of months, and then I’ll share a couple of specific ways this is playing out in my own life.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Back in May, Nintendo released one of the most anticipated video games of the last decade, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Since its release to some of the highest scores in video game review history, it has been called one of the best games of all time and is all but a shoe-in to win Game of the Year later this year at The Game Awards.

Tears of the Kingdom was delayed at least a year, which some attributed to COVID—almost certainly a factor—but the famously meticulous team developing the game reportedly spent a whole year polishing the game when it was technically finished (specifically the physics). Polygon reported:

Nintendo reportedly used a full year of Tears of the Kingdom’s development for polish, and it shows. “The amount of different options available is a testament to the amount of work that every single person at every level of the team did, especially the QA testers,” Moon said. “Open-world games with a ton of real-time physics objects like this are notoriously difficult to QA test.”

The video game industry is worth hundreds of billions of dollars, and it is only growing. It is cutthroat with developers and hardware manufacturers seemingly always at war with one another in some form or fashion. Amidst all of that and a global pandemic during which having a AAA title like Tears of the Kingdom would have only helped Nintendo’s stock price and value, they delayed the game to make it the absolute best.

The developers were playing the long game. Better to have a near-perfect game than a game released too early. 

SypherPK and His YouTube Trajectory

One of the most successful video game YouTubers of the last five years or more is a guy who goes by SypherPK. He primarily creates content around Fortnite, so it’s easy to assume he has been successful for simply being one of the most consistent content creators in the space for a long time, or even because he’s really good at the game (he is). His videos are mostly family-friendly, and he’s unmatched in his consistency.

In the last few years as many former Fortnite creators have fled to other games, Sypher has stayed on his Fortnite path, and he’s reaped the rewards. In the last year he’s begun a massive production company that operates out of a giant warehouse in Austin, TX. I think Sypher’s story is only just beginning. In the long run, I think he’ll be remembered more for his scaled YouTube production more than his Fortnite gameplay. What he’s doing with Oni Studios is really impressive.

Anyway, a few weeks ago I came across a TikTok of Sypher explaining how he got to be as popular as he is on YouTube today. Here’s the video:

@sypherpkSuccess doesn't happen in one day #sypherpk #fortnite

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I think that if you’re going to see success in many areas of life, not just YouTube content creation, you need to be willing to put in a ton of work when no one is paying attention.

My Own Long Games

As I consider my transition out of young adulthood into something more like my middle-aged years, I’ve been reflecting more on my personal long games. 

Certainly my career is a long game—I would like to continue being able to pay my mortgage and help put food in our pantry. Even still, I’m considering strongly what it means to no longer primarily be the “social media guru” that I’ve always been typecast as. I want to broaden my skills, manage more than one person, and learn other areas of business and leadership that have very little to do with the Facebook algorithm or how to handle trolls on Twitter.

Likewise in my life as a writer I am attempting to play the long game. I want to publish as many books as possible in my life, but only if I’m able to write things worth publishing. I’m grateful to have written two non-fiction books about social media and our relationship with it the last two years, but I think I’m done writing books about social media (at least in that form). I have hopes of doing a lot more creative writing, so I’m putting in the work now to learn how to be effective in that space. I would really love to dive into that end of the pool and see if I can tell stories that move people.

Finally, perhaps the most important long game I’m playing other than in my faith and marriage is in my role as a father. Our daughter Maggie is almost three-and-a-half and we have another little girl, Daisy, who will be joining us this fall. More and more I am realizing how much attention and intentionality it is going to require of me to be the kind of father I want to be—the kind of father that points my girls to their heavenly Father. Especially as Maggie has been getting older I have begun to realize just how much work discipling and loving your children is.

Life is a collection of long games, I think. And the sooner we realize that we’re running a collection of parallel marathons rather than a series of simultaneous sprints, the better we’ll be at appreciating and playing the long game.