Marginal Thinking

I just finished listening to Clayton Christensen’s book How Will You Measure Your Life?  I highly recommend it for anyone trying to prioritize and evaluate one’s own life.  One of the concepts that stuck out to me was the idea of “marginal thinking”.  He suggested that this way of thinking can cause us to make choices which seem good in the near term but which lead to terrible outcomes in the long run.  He used comparisons from business to help us see how certain theories apply to our own lives.  One of the companies he discussed was Blockbuster, a company that dominated movies in the 1990s but went bankrupt in 2010 because of its failure to compete with companies like Netflix.  In the early 2000s Blockbuster had the capital and means to do what Netflix was doing, but they decided that marginally it didn’t make sense.  They had higher profit margins with their own business model, so why invest in a business model that would give less return on investment?  Looking at the marginal returns they might expect in the short term suggested that it wasn’t worth it.  But the reason they should have adopted a model similar to Netflix, of course, was that in the longer term their in store model of renting videos and DVDs would completely die.  But they were so shortsighted and marginal in their thinking that they failed to prepare for that future and lost the entire business. 

Christensen suggested that we make the same kind of mistakes of marginal thinking in our own lives.  It’s easy to make choices based on the benefits we perceive we will get in the near term, but often that leads to unhappiness in the long term.  As I think about it, it seems to me that most of what the prophets teach and the way they lived showed us the importance of maximizing our happiness in the long term instead of the short term.  We speak of things such as eternal marriage or happiness in the life to come and resisting temptation and staying out of debt.  All of those kinds of principles are about resisting the urge to get instant gratification now and making choices to ensure our peace and joy in the long run.  Lehi never would have left Jerusalem, Noah never would have built his ark, and Captain Moroni never would have fortified his cities during times of peace if they had had marginal thinking; and how different their stories would have been if they hadn’t acted when they did.  For us in the last days the Savior put it this way: “Prepare ye, prepare ye for that which is to come, for the Lord is nigh” (D&C 1:12).  The problem with Blockbuster’s thinking was that it assumed that the world was not going to change, and yet it did drastically.  It’s easy in our personal lives to think that the status quo will always continue; this leads to focusing on short term enjoyment and doing those things that we think make us happy right now because (we think) there are no major future changes to prepare for.  But the gospel teaches us that the future will indeed bring great changes, ultimately culminating in our day of reckoning when we stand to be judged before the Lord.  And if we haven’t prepared properly for that day—if we have only done what “marginally” made us happy—we may find ourselves quoting this scripture: “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and my soul is not saved!” (D&C 56:16)