What’s important about the long game…

… is that it is all about the long game.

About 10 years ago or more I had an electric garage door fitted to a double garage at our house.

As I think on now an electric garage door is probably one of the most ridiculous things that I have ever bought. I had a perfectly functioning garage door that had been in place for about 25 years that was a collection of plastic wheels and wires. It folded up, it folded down, it was no drama. The only problem was that I had to get out my car to close and open it, still no drama. Sometimes I even got a little bit wet, still no drama.

As an aside to this blog I replaced my manual garage door with an electric garage door, this has caused me no end of difficulties but doesn’t that seem to be the case in the life we live, it becomes more and more complicated.

Anyway, I contacted the garage door company again today because we have not been able to use the electric garage door for 4 weeks for fear of the fact that it might fall off (it fell off twice just after it had been fitted, on one occasion trapping my wife and baby son in the garage for a considerable period of time).

The garage door company simply do not give a sh*t about my door or getting it fixed or even speaking to me in any way politely or reasonably.

I had another conversation on the phone today to explain to someone what has happened. I tell the same story over and over again only to have them confirm to me that the parts that they told me a few days ago have not been ordered have in fact been ordered even though they have told me several times different things over several weeks.

In the end it is just a garage door. It doesn’t matter. The question you would ask is why do I use this company and the answer would be because it is the only one around.

And so to the long term do you think this company will be around in 10 years. I think not.

Perhaps they don’t care about that but it seems that the young guys that come to fit the garage doors do care, it’s the people at the top of the business extracting the most amount of money for the least amount of investment that don’t give a monkey’s.

The thing about the long term is that it is about the long term, it’s about investing some of the things you have now to ensure a better future.

Three examples of that are below, after thinking about garage doors and sh*t companies I came across these situations in my own life.

1. My eldest daughter Grace and I are sharing a book at the moment, Homodeus by Yuval Noah Harrari. This is the extraordinary second book after Sapiens and a huge thanks to Gregor McGlashan for the unnecessary gift of giving me it.  The point about this though is that Grace and I started reading books together when she was maybe 6 months old.              We started with The Hungry Caterpillar anybody who has had children in the last 10 years or who has children will know that book. I used to read to Grace when I was exhausted and fall asleep in the bed beside her and she used to poke me with her finger and wake me up and tell me to carry on. She memorized the words to the books and would tell me if I tried to skip words or I if I had got it wrong. If I’m honest there were times that I read to Grace when I was just too tired to read, without seeing what was coming in the future. It’s quite extraordinary, not only to share a book like this with your daughter but to be able to talk about it.

2. Rosie is my youngest daughter and the middle child, we watch movies together. Recently she came home and told me that she was studying ‘The Dark Knight’ in English pretending to be a film critic and so we watched ‘The Dark Knight’ (I had never seen it before). We then went on to watch all the other Batman movies and now Rosie and I can share that. Our movie watching started with a My Little Pony movie, countless times years ago when I didn’t want to watch it.

3. My son, Callum who is 10 in December. Callum has just got his first road bike. He can’t cycle too far at the minute and the time that I spend on the road bike with Callum is obviously time that I could spend on the bike myself getting fitter and stronger, going up bigger hills or doing longer rides. When I was in Alpe d'huez this summer one of the guys in one of the bars told me that he had just cycled up the mountain with his son for the first time. He was 14 years old. If Callum and I don’t start cycling longer distances now together we will never cycle up Alpe d'huez in 4 years time. We intend to do that.

The long term is about the long term. It takes investment in yourself financially, emotionally and effort but some of your life must be set aside to do this, to reap the benefits when the future comes around. I don’t think anybody at the garage door company understands that.

Blog post number: 1415