5 Ways Your Business Will Benefit From Having a Long-Term Outlook Entrepreneurs have to consider the long-haul. Research shows that having an eye toward the future will make your business more profitable.

There's a myth about entrepreneurship — the belief that the hardest part is the beginning, the early-stage all-out hustle mode, which, so the thinking goes, will ultimately lead to big rewards. But in my experience as CEO of JotForm for over 15 years, I've found the opposite is true: the hardest part of being an entrepreneur is playing the slow game, including putting off short-term rewards — like investors, cash injections, and innumerable flashy perks — in favor of far-reaching, slow-drip success. It requires waking up and recommitting to your long-term vision every single day, even when the pay-off is difficult to visualize.

Related: Don't Let Short-Term Thinking Undermine Long-Term Success

As bestselling author James Clear has written, "[t]he hard way is rarely harder in terms of daily effort, but it's harder psychologically." Part of that, says Clear, is trusting that small things will lead to big things. Though it may seem like a blind leap of faith, experts have found that there are real and tangible benefits to this kind of thinking. Here are five.