Author Luca Dellanna discussed his book, Winning Long-Term Games: Reproducible Success Strategies to Achieve Your Life Goals, at MOI Global’s Meet-the-Author Forum.

Research director Alex Gilchrist hosts MOI Global’s Meet-the-Author Forum. The event brings together members and a select group of book authors in the pursuit of worldly wisdom. We are delighted to have an opportunity to inspire your reading.

See also John’s conversation with Luca on ergodicity.

Watch the conversation (recorded in the summer of 2024):

audio recording author page

About the book:

The key to winning long-term games is to stop playing them as a succession of separate short-term games.

Yet, most people take the opposite approach. Here are three examples:

The manager who sees each interaction with her team as a separate game. Every time she talks to her subordinates, it’s to get things done rather than develop their skills. As a result, she fails to build the long-term assets (a competent team) she needs in order to win her long-term game (a successful career).

The spouse who lies as a way to avoid responsibility. If lying has, say, a 1% chance of getting discovered, it’s a great short-term tactic (it succeeds 99% of the time) but a terrible long-term strategy (if you lie once a week, you have a 99.5% chance of getting caught over a decade).

The solopreneur who sends weekly emails to their mailing list and sees each as a separate game. Therefore, they consume their audience’s trust to generate more sales within a single email instead of building trust to create more sales within a few months.

These three examples show that approaching long-term games as a succession of separate short-term games is a bad strategy despite working great over short time horizons.

Instead, you should play short-term games not to win them but to progress your long-term objectives.

About the author:

A mechanical engineer by training, Luca Dellanna decided to quit his corporate job to become an independent researcher and author and shed light on the topics of nonlinearities on human collective behavior. Luca believes that those topics are essential for preventing human suffering, especially as the scale of our civilization keeps increasing.His style is concise and direct, focused on cause-effect relationships. He rejects top-down theories and explains most real-world phenomena with bottom-up hypotheses. Luca published his first book, “The Control Heuristic: Explaining Irrational Behavior and Resistance to Change”, in 2017. In the following year, he published another book titled “The World Through a Magnifying Glass: A New Theory to Explain Autism” and followed it up with “The Power of Adaptation”. Luca writes regularly on Twitter (@DellAnnaLuca). His personal website is luca-dellanna.com.

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