If you want to be successful in the long term, you need to think ahead.
Think how different the world would be in 5-10 years and think about what you can do today to navigate it better.
This sounds obvious but almost nobody does it.
I will give you a simple example of this from my field – affiliate marketing.
The Death of SEO
I’ve been in affiliate marketing for a long time and I’ve made many millions of dollars doing it over the years. It started with just spamming affiliate links on Reddit and then grew much larger.
Back in the early 2010s and all the way to ~2018, a very easy way to make money with affiliate marketing was to build websites with helpful content littered with affiliate links and focus on optimizing the SEO on them.
You could get millions of people to your website this way and make a bunch of money from anyone who clicked your link and bought the product.
People would take it to the extreme and create sites purely dedicated to reviewing products. As long as your SEO was good, you would get traffic from Google and earn a tidy profit.
After 2016, the game started getting steadily harder and you had to do more and more SEO to rank.
You needed to pay for backlinks, you had to stuff keywords, and you needed to monitor the competition because it was steadily increasing.
By the early 2020s the game was much harder and the amount of work that would bring you 3 million views in 2012 would now bring 200k views. And you’d be lucky if it even did that.
This is also why people who were in the field from back in the day say “SEO is dead” because you get less than 10% of the results for the same effort but the new guys don’t see it because from their perspective, the lower results are normal. It’s all they’ve seen.
The trend has continued and now we’re in 2025. And people are still obsessing over building their SEO.
Let’s think ahead about the world 5-10 years from now.
It’s very clear that by the year 2035 web search as we know it will no longer exist.
Not just SEO, but Google SERP style web search itself is dying. It will all be AI search (some improved version of it).
If you’re still putting in tons of time trying to optimize your SEO, paying for backlinks, and more – you are essentially wasting your effort.
In 5-10 years the SEO work you’re doing now will have little to no impact.
You are already seeing this happen today.
Housefresh traffic from Google is down ~95% in the March 2024 core update.
If you go on SEO forums you see horror stories like this:
Think about how you can get traffic on the internet of the future.
There is no point in complaining about Google’s practices and their decline. We need to find solutions to problems not cry about them.
Optimizing for AI search results is a waste of time because the number of clicks you’ll get is far too low for it to matter.
That leaves you with social media. We know social media will continue to thrive for the foreseeable future.
In other words, if you are smart, you need to be building your social media presence instead of committing large amounts of time and resources on SEO (yes you should still take the low hanging fruit).
In 10 years your social media account might be making you a million dollars while all your effort in SEO will probably bring you 100 extra clicks.
Copywriting will be around in 10 years. Graphic design probably won’t.
If you have to choose a skill, this would make copywriting more valuable from the long term perspective.
Although graphic design is still a useful skill to know and given that you can learn it in a few weeks, it’s something everyone should do.
But in the long run you will make much more money from copywriting than you will from graphic design.
Most life problems arise from short term thinking.
You have to think long term. At least 5 years into the future.
This is how you ensure you are always winning and far ahead of the masses.
This is how your business doesn’t die when technology changes.
This is how you avoid injuries in the gym.
The masses only do things that the system nudges them to do. They get a degree and then look for a job because that’s what the system teaches them to do.
We all know that jobs are useless if you want financial freedom. You can’t even buy a house in the city by working a job.
You will be forced into taking a big loan and spending your entire life paying it off. You need to be a debtor for life. So many people end up as slaves working for the profits of banks just to buy a house.
The long term solution is building an online business. If you’re making tens of thousands of dollars from the internet, you will quickly become financially free.
I bought my house in cash. I bought all my cars in cash. I have zero debt.
But most people are too lazy and impatient for that and would rather work 10 hours a day for a shitty paycheck and call another man his boss.
They want money next month. They don’t want to build something for a year before they see the green.
How many guys do you know who are in shitty marriages because they married the first girl who liked them back?
They didn’t want to do the work of building their personality and dating a bunch of women before they made a long term commitment.
It is all a result of short term thinking. You let your pressing needs for money and sex get you into making decisions that are not good for you in the long run.
And then you end up becoming a slave to a shitty wife who won’t sleep with you and to an employer who sucks every bit of energy from you in exchange for a monthly paycheck.
Of course you don’t even get to enjoy that paycheck because the wife got fat and spends most of it or divorced you and used the court system to take your money away every month.
This happens to countless men and you probably know many of them.
Even This Hobby Blog is Successful Because of Thinking 5-10 Years Ahead
All long term readers know that this blog is a hobby and not my main source of income. LMM makes me ~250k a year and is in the single digit percentage points of my total income.
I do it because I truly enjoy writing and I want to send the elevator back down to all men who want to be more successful. 99.99% of the content I produce is free. You aren’t paying me for these emails and believe me they take time to write.
But look at all the products I’m selling. They are timeless.
The Live Intentionally: 90 Day Self-Improvement Program was originally launched 6 years ago and will be just as useful to people 60 years from now.
Yes it’s gotten updated too because I’m not a static person and I learn new things with time.
The point is that most of my products are timeless.
My series on nutrition for hypertrophy can easily be compiled into an e-book for the future and will be just as useful and marketable 10 years later as it is today.
This website will stand the test of time because I am thinking about the future today.
This blog is structured to attract smart and ambitious people and repel the low IQs. How many low IQs can read walls of text? Almost none. Their brains are too fried from TikTok and Reels.
Every day someone messages me and tells me they made their first $1 online. Or they launched their first product.
By focusing on providing useful information to doers and winners, the website succeeds in the long run.
Of course I can make more money by publishing Buzzfeed style clickbait articles and adding Adsense to the site. But that is short term thinking.
In the long run, a high IQ high ambition readership + high quality free content + timeless paid products will far outdo the clickbait websites.
Always think 5-10 years ahead and you will rarely go wrong.
– Is this thing I’m doing going to set me ahead 10 years from now? Or is it a waste of time?
– Is this woman I’m falling in love with the right partner for me in 10 years? Or is she too selfish and unworthy?
– Is this source of income going to get me where I want to go in 10 years? Or is it a waste of time like the SEO grind or a corporate job.
If you do this, you will come out ahead.
The masses will keep doing whatever the system tells them and will slowly end up behind.
In a few short years you will be too far ahead to be caught.
You just gotta bite the bullet and do the work for a few years. This is true in all things.
Be it dating or money or fitness.
Dating – Get experience with women before you marry. Especially if you’re in a falsely conservative culture like India.
Don’t try to jump the gun and get into a committed relationship or a marriage before you get experience. Get at least a few girls under your belt, ideally a lot more. Read The Seduction Bible + The Book of Pook.
Money – Build a business with marketing channels that will still be around in a while. Just because something worked well in 2015 does not mean it still works today.
The internet is fast moving. This is why my guide The Art of X has to be updated so often. Things just change.
Investing – What companies and industries will still be around in 10 years? Warren Buffett famously invested in chewing gum and Coca Cola because people would be drinking them forever. Likewise
Bitcoin is going to gain more ground over fiat simply as a result of network effects and limited supply (if you’re investing large sums make sure to read The No-BS Guide to Crypto Investing).
Fitness – How many guys end up with life altering shoulder and ligament injuries by going too heavy too soon? Learn the principles of nutrition and progressive overload. Eat and lift accordingly.
And you will get stronger, fitter, and avoid injuries. Instead of becoming overweight as you age like most people, you get better and better. The distance increases as people go down and you go up.
In any realm of endeavor where you think short term and focus on immediate returns at the cost of long term returns, you will end up being mediocre. To get ahead you have to think about the future now and steer your ship with that in mind.
Hope that helps.
Until next time.
Your man,
Harsh Strongman
wpDiscuz
