When you zoom out to 70,000 years of human history, today’s crisis looks different. That shift in perspective changes how you lead.
I read Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens a few years ago and it rewired something in how I think. Not about history, exactly. About scale. About what actually matters when you take the long view.
The book traces human history from the cognitive revolution 70,000 years ago to today. It covers the agricultural revolution, the rise of empires, the scientific revolution, and the interconnected world we live in now. But what stuck with me wasn’t any single event. It was the perspective.
The Day-to-Day Fades
Most of what consumes our attention today won’t matter in a year. Almost none of it will matter in ten. At the scale Harari writes about, entire empires rise and fall in a few pages.
Some might call that nihilism, but I find it freeing. When you internalize that the urgent email, the difficult conversation, the project that’s behind schedule are all temporary, you handle them differently. The anxiety drops. You can think more clearly because you’re not treating everything like a survival threat.
I still care about getting things right. But I’ve stopped pretending that most problems are as serious as they feel in the moment.
What Actually Lasts
Harari argues that what made humans dominant wasn’t strength or speed. It was our ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers, built on shared stories and beliefs. Money, nations, corporations, religions: these are all fictions we agree to believe in, and that agreement lets us coordinate at scale.
At work, this translates directly. The culture you build, the trust you establish, the way people learn to work together: these outlast any individual project or product. Teams that share a clear understanding of what they’re doing and why will outperform teams that don’t, regardless of talent levels.
The shared story matters more than the quarterly numbers.
Progress Is Real
One thing Sapiens reinforced for me: despite everything, humans have made extraordinary progress. Life expectancy, literacy, poverty reduction, violence per capita. By almost every measure, the average human today lives better than royalty did a few centuries ago.
This matters for leadership because pessimism is easy and optimism requires effort. When you understand the long arc of human improvement, you can hold both realities: yes, there are serious problems, and yes, we’ve solved serious problems before. That combination of clear-eyed realism and grounded hope is what effective leadership looks like.
Applying the Long View
I’ve started asking myself a question when things get stressful: will this matter in ten years? Usually the answer is no, and that helps me respond proportionally instead of reacting emotionally.
For the things that do matter at that scale, like relationships, reputation, the skills your team develops, the culture you build, try to invest more attention. These compound over time. They’re the things that actually last.
Sapiens is a long book and not everyone will read it. But the core shift is available to anyone: step back far enough that you can see the whole arc, and suddenly it’s easier to tell what’s urgent from what’s important.