This week Latvia (where I’m from) celebrates Father’s Day, and I found myself thinking again about something that’s influenced my thinking over a decade ago.
Ask a CEO or any executive how far ahead they think, and you’ll usually get the same answer: three to five years. Some will stretch to ten if you push them — a bold strategic horizon, they’ll call it.
Many years ago, I read a book called Anchor Man by Steve Farrar. He challenges that thinking and puts a different number on what real long-term thinking actually means:
Roughly a hundred years. And it starts at home, with your closest ones.
The book is specifically about fathers, and the huge role a present father plays in who a child becomes, and what they carry forward into the next generation.
Why a 100-year horizon?
Because children become who they are largely by watching what their parents do, not what they say. If you have children, it actually means — you shape your children, they shape their own children, and those children shape their children.
Psychology research backs this up too: parents’ impact reaches across three generations. Children absorb far more from a parent’s actual behavior and emotional patterns than anything they’re ever told directly. And that imprint carries forward into how those children raise the next generation.
Just think about it.
Your choices today will impact three generations. Reaching people you will never meet.
This thought alone can change the way you lead and live.
This new perspective changed how I think and make choices since.
And it’s not really about business or strategy at all. It’s about how far your character actually reaches — in the business you build, and in the life you live. The way you treat people, what you refuse to compromise on, what you do when nobody’s watching, where you spend your energy and time.
Why it matters
If your thinking horizon is a hundred years, not five, something changes about the choice in front of you right now — the one that seems small, the one that costs you something today with no visible payoff.
Every time you choose how to treat someone, what to do or say when it costs you, whether to cut a corner nobody would catch, where to focus your energy — you’re not just producing today’s outcome. You’re shaping yourself into a certain kind of person your children are watching.
A strategy is about what you’ll build. A hundred-year horizon is about who you become while building it, and who you will shape along the way. And that impact will outlast any business or movement you’re building.
And it doesn’t stop entirely with family. If you don’t have children — yet, or at all — this is where the principle still fully applies to you.
Real people under your influence are watching you more closely than you think. Not copying what you say you value. Copying what you actually do and protect when it costs you something.
A mentee absorbs how you handle pressure, not just what you tell them about handling it. A team member who watches you cut a corner learns that’s allowed, whether you say so or not. These people go on to lead someone else one day, carrying a piece of you into a situation you’ll never witness.
But none of them inherit as much of you as your own children do.
A mentee or a team member sees you for a limited period of time. Your children live inside your decisions and example every single day, absorbing what’s true about you and your values before they’re even old enough to notice they’re doing it.
True legacy and what kind of legacy you leave — starts there.
This is why this type of long-term perspective is not about a bigger plan. It is about a closer look at the choices you’re making today. Because they ripple into lives you will never meet.
Your action this week
Think about the choices in front of you this week and reflect on the ones you’ve already made:
- A choice you’re facing right now. Are you deciding it for this year’s result, or for who it makes you in the long-run?
- Where did your integrity actually get tested this week, in real situations, not hypothetically? Would you make the same choice again today?
- Identify one value you’d want still true of you in twenty years. Did this week’s decisions match it?
What’s one choice today you’d make differently if you actually believed it would still matter in a hundred years?
Cheers, Andrey Sergeyev
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