Masayoshi Son Quotes

People often overestimate what will happen in the next two years and underestimate what will happen in ten.

I think in terms of 20-year horizons.

People often say that it is easier to predict the way things are going to be 10 to 20 years in the future than to predict how it is going to be 3 years from now.

It's not worth getting too excited about thinking about the larger picture. The larger picture doesn't come into focus for an awfully long time.

I try to get a vision of the future, and then I try to figure out where the discontinuities are.

Science has not yet mastered prophecy. We predict too much for the next year and yet far too little for the next 10.

I admit, I'm suspicious of any career planning that involves chasing the next 'big thing,' just because it's so hard to predict what the next big thing is going to be a couple of years - or even six months - out.

Political activity means working for the future; the more we look into the future the more far-sighted will our policy be - so much the more clear and decided. The less far we try to see into the future, the more we content ourselves with the daily routine (Alltäglichkeit), the more weak and uncertain will be our policy of to-day. Every politician of note must, therefore endeavor out of the present to conclude what the future will be, and, if he wants to win the masses to his politics then he must attempt to make his expectations of the future plausible

We're so used to thinking in the short term, and the minute you speak in more long-term language then you tend to get dismissed as utopian and so on. We have a real problem here in making long-term thinking respectable

The next president is going to be faced with the prospect of realigning our national security interests with our resources—–and for God's sake, getting some certainty into the budget process so we can actually plan.... Instead, we tend to look at things one year at a time.

With poker, you have a resolution of the hand within a couple of minutes. Whereas, even if the thought process in investing is very much the same, you're looking at an outcome that could be 2, 3, 4, 5 years from when you make the original decision. And the mindset related to that is very different.

I think long-term, not short-term.

I understand that fans think short-term, and there's nothing wrong with that. You live or you die in the short term. But I believe in our system, and when you do that, you don't make knee-jerk decisions.

People need to look beyond just the immediate victory... There are no permanent victories.

An entrepreneur never thinks of quarter-on-quarter; he thinks for 25 years, 50 years.

Today, if someone showed me a five-year plan, I'd toss out the pages detailing Years Three, Four and Five as pure fantasy Anyone who thinks he or she can evaluate business conditions five years from now, flunks.

It's impossible for us to forecast what's going to happen ten years from now and make a decision today to say what we're going to do.

The present is never the mark of our designs. We use both past and present as our means and instruments, but the future only as our object and aim.

I live for the moment. I'm basically a Buddhist-type person. I'm just here right now, and I don't think about what's going to happen a hundred years from now. I try to concentrate on what's going on right now. But I'm really trying to run this company like it is going to be here a hundred years from now. That's what's important.

My positioning with my investors was always, I need three to five years.

I'm no genius. I'm not at all; I just happen to look five or 10 years ahead and think things through.

Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.

I feel like I have no real solid plans like, "this is what I'm going to do and I will do it by 2017" or whatever.

Life is amazingly unpredictable; any 22-year-old who thinks they know where they will be in 10 years, much less in 30, is simply lacking imagination.

In the future, it will become increasingly obvious that your competitors are just as clueless as you are.