The Blind Spot of the Immediate Win
I. The Shot That Wins the Game — and Loses the Season
In the 2013 NBA Finals, the San Antonio Spurs weren’t just chasing a championship—they were rewriting a narrative. The year before, they’d suffered a heartbreaking loss to the Miami Heat, a series decided in the final seconds of Game 6 when Ray Allen sank one of the most famous three-pointers in basketball history 1.
Many teams would have come back the next year determined to hit harder and faster—driving for flashy plays, overloading star players, and betting on adrenaline-fueled bursts of scoring.
The Spurs took the opposite approach. They doubled down on ball movement, patience, and system discipline. No isolation heroics. No desperate overcorrections. Across five games, they dismantled the Heat, winning by an average margin of 14 points—the largest in Finals history at the time 2.
Sportswriters called it “a masterclass in long-game thinking” 3. The Spurs understood a truth that applies well beyond basketball: momentum can win a game, but systems win seasons.
II. The Startup Equivalent
In startups, the fast-break three-pointer is the viral growth hack. It feels exhilarating—traffic spikes, your dashboard lights up green, investors applaud. But like an ill-advised half-court shot, it can put you out of position for the plays that matter most.
I remember in my own early days leading a small SaaS team, we discovered a clever integration trick that gave us a huge bump in signups after a single tweet from a well-known influencer. It was tempting to keep milking the tactic, but in the churn data, we saw those users weren’t sticking around. Pulling back from that spotlight—and redirecting resources toward a slower product onboarding overhaul—meant sacrificing immediate growth headlines for a foundation that ultimately doubled retention within a year.
The same trap exists in daily life. You rush out the door without making the bed, straightening the house, or packing a lunch. At noon, you’re swamped, so you either skip lunch or grab something that’s out of step with your dietary goals. When you finally return home, the sight of an unmade bed and dirty dishes drains your energy. The quick gain—saving 10 minutes in the morning—ends up costing you rest, restoration, and readiness for the next day.
Consider:
A consumer app launches with a quirky PR stunt, downloads explode, but retention collapses within 90 days 4.
A direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand builds a massive Instagram following through giveaways—only to discover that social followers don’t necessarily translate into paying customers 5.
A SaaS company undercuts pricing to steal market share, only to lock itself into margins that make reinvestment impossible 6.
In the short term, these look like wins. In reality, they can erode brand positioning, deplete resources, and create customer expectations that are expensive—or impossible—to sustain.
III. Game Theory’s Warning About Short-Termism
This isn’t just a business cautionary tale; it’s a principle embedded in game theory.
In the early 1980s, political scientist Robert Axelrod ran a series of computer tournaments based on the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a thought experiment in which two players are arrested for a crime and must decide independently whether to cooperate with each other or betray the other to authorities 7. If both remain silent, they receive light sentences. If one betrays and the other stays silent, the betrayer goes free while the other receives the maximum penalty. If both betray, they both get heavy sentences. The “dilemma” arises because betrayal offers a higher individual payoff in the short term, but mutual cooperation yields the best collective outcome over time.
Axelrod’s tournaments revealed that the most successful strategy wasn’t the one that maximized points in a single round. It was “Tit for Tat”—cooperative on the first move, then mirroring the other player’s last move—predictable, forgiving, and resistant to exploitation. Over many iterations, this approach outperformed short-term opportunism by building trust and reciprocal cooperation.
Iterated games like the Repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma appear everywhere: price-matching wars between rival airlines, where cooperation on pricing can lead to stable profits but undercutting erodes margins for both; workplace collaboration between departments, where sharing resources fosters collective wins but hoarding information breeds inefficiency; or even diplomatic trade agreements, where honoring terms builds alliances and breaking them invites retaliation.
In iterated games, reputation compounds. Every move sets the tone for future moves. A player who grabs every short-term advantage quickly becomes isolated.
Markets are, in essence, iterated games. Whether you’re dealing with customers, employees, or partners, your current win either strengthens—or undermines—the conditions for the next one.
IV. How the Blind Spot Forms
Psychologically, the immediate win is seductive because it’s visible, measurable, and emotionally rewarding. There’s an instant dopamine hit from seeing metrics climb or getting public validation, which can override more measured, strategic thinking. Behavioral economists call this hyperbolic discounting: we irrationally overweight immediate rewards compared to delayed ones 8. The short-term “win” hijacks our brain’s reward system, making it harder to value benefits that accrue slowly over time.
This bias becomes especially potent under pressure:
Investor demands for quarterly growth push leaders toward tactical wins that can be reported quickly, even if they undermine strategic health.
Competitive threats trigger the body’s fight-or-flight response, flooding the system with stress hormones that narrow focus to immediate survival 9. In these moments, long-term strategy feels abstract compared to the urgency of the threat.
Media attention creates what researcher Zeynep Tufekci calls a “visibility treadmill,” where companies optimize for attention spikes instead of sustainable traction 10. Leaders begin to chase headlines rather than building enduring value.
We also see this in everyday habits: the quick reply to an email instead of finishing deep work, or choosing a fast but low-quality meal because it’s “just easier right now.” In both business and life, the urgent edges out the important.
These conditions make the blind spot almost inevitable—unless leaders intentionally train themselves to look beyond it. This training can include creating decision buffers, running scenario analyses that project years ahead, and rewarding teams for progress on slow-moving metrics, not just immediate gains.
V. Building the Long-Game Reflex
1. Scoreboard Layering
Create dual dashboards: performance now and positioning later. For example, track not just customer acquisition, but customer health scores or net revenue retention over 12–24 months 11.
2. Decision Pre-Mortems
Before pursuing a high-visibility win, run a pre-mortem: If this works, what behaviors does it incentivize? What doors might it close? If it fails, what’s the collateral damage? This slows the decision cycle just enough to catch avoidable risks 12.
3. Reputation Banking
Act as if your brand is a long-term asset account—every choice either makes a deposit or a withdrawal. Prioritize actions that build trust, even if their payback period is years away. Amazon’s early investment in free shipping eroded margins for years but became a cornerstone of its customer loyalty moat 13.
VI. Closing Perspective
The immediate win feels good because it confirms you’re doing something right. But the companies—and the leaders—who endure treat each win as a single frame in a much longer reel.
The Spurs didn’t just win the 2013 Finals; they cemented a culture and a play style that would define their legacy. Startups that resist the lure of the quick spike do the same: they trade adrenaline for endurance.
Winning today is easy. Winning again, and again, and again—that’s strategy.
Sources & References
NBA.com. 2013 NBA Finals Game 6 Recap. https://www.nba.com/news/2013-finals-game-6-recap
ESPN. Spurs Rout Heat to Clinch 2014 Title. https://www.espn.com/nba/recap/_/gameId/400579511
Lowe, Zach. Inside the Spurs’ Beautiful Game. Grantland, 2014. https://grantland.com/the-triangle/inside-the-spurs-beautiful-game/
Chen, Brian X. When Apps Go Viral and Then Vanish. New York Times, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/31/technology/app-viral-fade.html
Shopify Plus. Why Giveaways Don’t Guarantee Growth. https://www.shopify.com/enterprise/instagram-giveaways
Harvard Business Review. The Perils of Price Wars. 2017. https://hbr.org/2017/04/the-perils-of-price-wars
Axelrod, Robert. The Evolution of Cooperation. Basic Books, 1984. ISBN: 9780465021215
Laibson, David. “Golden Eggs and Hyperbolic Discounting.” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1997. DOI: 10.1162/003355397555253
Sapolsky, Robert M. Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. Penguin, 2017. ISBN: 9781594205071
Tufekci, Zeynep. Twitter and Tear Gas. Yale University Press, 2017. ISBN: 9780300166511
Gainsight. The Customer Health Playbook. https://www.gainsight.com/guides/the-customer-health-playbook/
Klein, Gary. Performing a Project Premortem. Harvard Business Review, 2007. https://hbr.org/2007/09/performing-a-project-premortem
Stone, Brad. The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. Little, Brown, 2013. ISBN: 9780316219266