Taking into account the intertemporal gap

The benefit in the short term often contradicts the long term. For example, eating half a cake every day to treat yourself may be more beneficial in the short term, but in the long term, it leads to weight gain, shortness of breath, and a sense of physical discomfort. Closing a course right now and going to engage in your hobby may be more advantageous, but if you constantly postpone learning, your skills in modeling and focus (or in another chosen course) will not improve. You will not be able to achieve improvement and acceleration in your activities; it will be more difficult for you to continue growing in your career. The same thing happens with companies: if there is absolutely no attention to such an object as "long term existence" (or "long time scale"), actions that do not yield instant results will not be taken by the company as a whole. For example, not enhancing the focus (or performance discipline) of employees because it is "long, painful, difficult." The company may also constantly prioritize exclusively short-term solutions, such as "ensuring good sales this month at any cost." This can lead to consequences like "80% of customers stop buying in a few months" (that is, in the long term, the company loses money on attracting customers) or "we constantly sell non-standard products" (no mass production of products, no opportunity to produce a product of exceptional quality achievable in series, no opportunity to optimize production costs by ensuring production predictability). In the long run, the company may lose money in production.

Neglecting attention to the interim gap can result in the cumulative effect of "rationally dilly-dallying daily," leading to a completely different outcome than the one you may have been striving for. This happens in part because in the long term, one of the most critical success factors is investing in the agent's future, which by default implies not instant results, but deferred payoff.

In principle, there is nothing wrong with daily rational dilly-dallying: if you are satisfied with the results and do not feel like you are heading in the wrong direction, you can sing and dance like a dragonfly from "Thumbelina." In the modern world, you can live like this quite well and even have a more or less normal life.

However, if you wish to be an actor and build large systems, and you are also interested in ensuring that they are stable enough and can exist after your death, you need to consider the interim gap and plan for the longer term. The long-term goal will not only define the overall development direction, but also impose restrictions on the actions allowed in the short term. For example, an entrepreneur who wants to create a business that will exist after their death (like the Mayo Clinic), cannot afford to deceive customers and try to make money using financial pyramid methods like MMM right from the start. They should already focus on building long-term relationships with customers. And rational dilly-dallying can be used for short-term adjustment to circumstances and for discussing the possibility of changing the development direction (so that the entrepreneur has an idea in their head that changing the development direction is possible).

Furthermore, discussing the interim gap is important when people discuss which goal to choose. In such discussions, questions like "when do we want to achieve this? And when can we achieve this?" are often overlooked. As a result, an expectation-reality gap is formed, which could have been avoided by making a little effort at the start.