Wealth and Giftedness for a Lifetime

The Long Game: Why Deep Time Thinking Is Our Most Undervalued Intelligence

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If you love history and longitudinal studies, you may be a big-picture thinker.

Come with me on this adventure into the land where professional fields intersect with communication strengths, then take on intense meaning if you are gifted.

Here's One Exciting Big Picture Thinker

The lifetime studies of Deborah Ruf, Ph.D. captured my imagination, heart, and mind. I warn you, her words are habit-forming. Once you start reading her articles on Substack—Gifted Through the Lifespan, or go deep into her latest book, The 5 Levels of Gifted Children Grown Up: What They Tell Us, your mind explodes with hundreds of questions and greater interest in everyone around you plus a liberation that happens only when you understanding yourself.

Here's Another Exciting Big Picture Thinker

There's a good reason Heather Cox Richardson has the most subscribers of thousands of publications on Substack with her Letters from An American. She writes about history and makes it fascinating, every day, and every paragraph. Professional communicators and journalists adore historians and long-game thinking. It's a tight love relationship because we feel the weight and importance of truth and accurate documentation. Without professional communicators and journalists, historians have no evidence for their writing. Without historians and some kind of lifetime value, the whole exercise of writing and keeping records loses meaning.

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Where is the Value in This for You?

In a world obsessed with what’s next, we risk losing sight of what lasts. The deep truths about human life—how we grow, what shapes us, and what actually matters—don’t reveal themselves in quarters or campaigns. They emerge across lifetimes.

That’s why long-game thinking may be one of the most undervalued forms of intelligence we have.

Professionals who solve complex problems, guide others, or craft messages that move minds often rely on intuition shaped by experience. But intuition deepens when it’s grounded in patterns that stretch over decades. And those patterns only emerge when we zoom out far enough to see them. No way in hell AI or ChatGPT can touch this.

Do We Grow Into Big-Picture Thinkers?

There’s evidence that attention shifts with age—not just in focus, but in scale. The young mind often seeks novelty and urgency. As we mature, our attention (when not hijacked by screens or stress) tends toward synthesis and meaning.

Neuroscience supports this. The prefrontal cortex—the seat of long-term planning and reflection—doesn’t fully mature until our mid-twenties. And as we age, lived experience teaches us something even more valuable: What’s noise, and what matters.

But this shift isn’t guaranteed. In a culture of constant interruption, we’re training our minds away from complexity and toward immediacy. Even highly capable adults risk losing the cognitive space required for the long view.

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Who Still Thinks in Lifetimes?

Longitudinal studies—research that follows people across 20, 50, even 80 years—offer rare insight into what truly shapes a life. Harvard’s Study of Adult Development and the Framingham Heart Study are monuments to patient science. They show, for example, that loving relationships predict health more reliably than genetics or income.

These studies are often funded by universities, federal government agencies (like NIH), or foundations that understand the public value of deep data. Private sectors like insurance and health tech also track lives over time—but often with narrower motives: prediction, monetization, and risk.

The difference isn’t just funding—it’s purpose.

What the Long View Reveals

Why does this matter? Because only longitudinal thinking can expose slow-building truths: How early trauma shapes adult health, how lifelong curiosity affects longevity, and how delayed patterns tell deeper stories than fast data ever could.

Short-sightedness, by contrast, comes with a cost. It narrows our sense of time, reduces our tolerance for ambiguity, and favors reactive decisions over wise ones.

In leadership, communication, and even relationships, the absence of historical and developmental context leads to brittle choices and shallow insights.

A Thought for the Gifted Mind

If you’re someone who’s always felt drawn to the bigger picture—even when the world rewards speed and certainty—you’re not alone.

Long-game thinkers are essential now. But the muscle of deep attention needs protecting.

Read slow. Think across decades. Mentor across generations. Support institutions that track stories—not just stats.

Because wisdom isn’t fast. It’s earned. And it thinks in lifetimes.

A Thought for Professionals and Communicators Chasing Wealth

Another long-term study started during the Great Depression gives us answers today about wealth and happiness. Who has the money and the staying power to stick with a study of humans for their whole life? Harvard University researchers began tracking the health and happiness of a group of students, including John F. Kennedy, Jr., who became our 35th President.

Today, only 19 of the original 268 participants are still alive, and they are in their 90s. Throughout their lives, these participants endured a barrage of poking and prodding. Every two years, they were asked detailed questions about their marriages, job satisfaction, and social lives, including their personal and professional victories and defeats. Every aspect of their lives was an open book.

Money played little or no role in overall health or happiness:

1. Personal relationships—and the happiness of those relationships—had an enormous impact on the person's health.

2. Those who had taken better care of themselves early in life were healthier and happier later in life.

3. These factors dramatically impacted the happiness of the Harvard study group: Frequent participation in physical activity, healthy weight, stable marriage, and mechanisms to deal with life's ups and downs.

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What is Your Historical Moment and Big Picture for Today?

Why does lifetime-scale thinking matter beyond this week or beyond the Trump Reign of Terror and Retribution?

Because without it, we misread both causes and effects. We jump to conclusions. We mistake trend for truth. Only longitudinal thinking reveals delayed causality—how trauma at age five might impact cardiovascular health at fifty. Or how early literacy predicts civic engagement decades later.

But there’s a danger: short-sightedness isn’t just a cultural glitch—it’s a cognitive risk. It makes us reactive, polarizing, and myopic. When we don’t have time for complexity, we simplify. When we don’t have patience for patterns, we generalize. And when our attention is trained only on the next quarter, campaign, or crisis, we lose the ability to imagine the next generation.

What Does Deep Time Thinking Look Like in Practice?

Read research that spans decades, not just weeks.

Build teams and policies that account for human development over a lifetime.

Mentor across generations, not just demographics.

Value systems thinking over soundbites.

Fund and defend institutions that track data over time—not because they record what works, but because they show us who we are becoming.

Do you feel like you're on the edge of something amazing, and you just can't figure out what it is? That's where I come in. My name is Georgia Patrick. I work with curious, intense, understanding professionals—still in practice and retired—to tap into their full potential and get extremely clear on their gift (their value) to individuals actively seeking such wisdom. It starts with an email. Maybe later, a short call to make sure I hear you.

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