You get an idea for some exciting venture. The more you think about it, the more it excites you - and that is the beauty of ideas. After all some of them are so good that however long you think about them you do not wear them down. But rarely such ideas left to one’s selfish excitement would bring a change and have an impact on the outer world. So assuming you’re consumed by such a venture, it consumes most of your awake (and asleep) time and the turning moment comes, you have to make a leap. This can be moving to a new city or country, quitting your job, or merely dedicating time to write a play - whatever venture it is, it will require work to become material.
Above mostly applies to our personal fantasies, big or small. It applies to us only because individually we are accountable to ourselves mostly, hence if thousand exciting ventures just never materialize, this is individual loss. No outer world would have assumed benefits it could have reaped as it never would manifest. Individually integrity of people also varies, somebody might align their ventures to fit their character, other might blindly follow their heart, neglecting whatever their integrity is completely.
Degree of integrity and accountability are important of how and whether you materialize your ventures at all. But again because individually selfish pleasure trumps both of these, let’s see how this ventures play out in public ventures - or let’s call them policies.
Private (personal or solo) ventures does not incur public accountability and integrity. In contrast to these public ventures do. Policies have to be accountable at least to those who they intend to affect, hence they have clear goals, which indeed is some sort of an impact these policies seek to achieve. Impact on the other hand cannot be achieved if integrity is not in place.
Because goal of any policy is public impact, its intrinsic excitement is its result. Those who undertake the policy work thus become accountable to the way greater degree compared to their own individual ventures. They are expected to execute policy so that the impact is maximized. Ideally, policy work is selfless, because it does not belong to anyone, it is by design public.
For policy to have an impact, it must be of integrity. A policy that can be altered and rescinded will see its impact diminish. Hence when implementing and executing policy the tools at ones disposal become important, tools that secure its integrity. This is the first procedural issue to encounter.
Another argument to be made is whether policy should focus on long-term or short-term. And this is a substantive question. Long-termism can not survive without a process put up first that is respected and enforced afterwards. In order to commit to grand goal that requires couple of generations to observe it so they reap its benefits, you should get your hands dirty not in oh-so-beautiful-substance but into the nitty-gritty of the process. Short-termism’s benefit is the absence of this foundational work and direct action on the substance, with outcomes more visible and tangible (good or bad). But short-termism falls short on the certainty, as any good or benefit can be turned into bad or loss in quite similar fashion as it was turned into its first state - that is quickly.. Hence we face the dilemma, and it requires clear communication over the chosen direction for the policy. Committing to the long-termism is hard and can be sacrificial, selfless while committing to the short-termism can be selfish.
Both short-termism and long-termism look alike tactic and strategy respectively. But if tactic is a means to strategy, short and long-termism lack such an interlocking mechanism and one is usually trumping the other. Hence it is worth looking at substance and process. Long-term can be dedicated to the setting up of the process and to the formulation of a desired destination. Short-term can then refocus itself on the hands-on substance it will be bound by the process and by the long-term goal. This requires a clear and distinct separation of the processes.
This is universal structure for all public subjects, but it does work for the collective private goals as well. For that reason it is helpful not to think of policy in its classical sense but of any venture, that any one of us can start, big and small, private or public. This venture, however exciting, will benefit from some definitions and commitments. A venture can start in one’s mind but be gifted to public, a venture can start in collective mind and benefit that collective only. Whatever the structure whether to judge it in long-term or short-term will become a question so important that it might alter venture itself.
Rule of law and democracy is basically a working example of this structure. Lawmaking, as a process (rarely altered) and long-term in nature is what enables short-term goals (various bills that address current societal ills). The process that lawmaking enables is the safeguard of the people’s will. Bills can address many issues and can be overruled but they all go through the same procedural pipeline and it is of vital importance to understand that it is this pipeline that keeps the overarching goal of democracy alive. A corporate strategy and investment strategy are similar beasts on their own, the difference being that they profit limited number of people and they might go through less scrutiny (even public companies compared to government). Investment and corporate strategies will more often be under ruthless attack or indication to adopt short-termism, because such firms are first and foremost accountable to a limited parties, all who expect gain. Mastering discipline is a key in these regards because missing out good deals is hard. Those who trade stocks actively are good example, in order to sustain individual gain, they have to abide the principles they’ve spun out, these principles act like procedure, they ensure in the long-term the short-termism.
Another way to look at it is sum of parts. If ventures are constant, it is not through dimension of time that we observe them, but dimension of space. Such ventures are natural processes mostly, constant and undefined, occurring regardless of human intervention. Such processes would fall under macroscopic or microscopic observation. While in no way one should discard particle level processes, it is on macroscopic scale that thermodynamic system endures their impact. Nevertheless it is wrong to observe natural processes in similar fashion as we do with man-made structure of ventures, because in natural processes we do not exert control over the particle level processes, particle is not accountable to any of us, hence you can never judge particle’s integrity. While in physics one can assume that particle can react to our actions, we are not in a position to do so in controlled, sustainable way so that we model processes towards our benefits, especially processes such as in high energy physics.