Ask HN: How to incentivize people for a long term project?

[waqasaday]

Hey HN, I’ve been thinking about building something that will likely require 2-3 centuries of work and long term commitment with not so shiny day-to-day progress, at least in the first 20 years. How do you incentivize people for such a long term thing. Especially normal everyday people, who are busy making their ends meet. One way is to connect their support with some kind of real world wealth/prestige/capital.

[version_five]

Serious answer is to spend the first 20+ years building a religion out of whatever your idea is. Religion has that kind of demonstrated staying power. And presumably if you have a 300 year vision for something it must have some pretty religious characteristics.

[sircastor]

This is what I was thinking too. The only projects I could figure that have lasted that scale of length are things like cathedrals, the pyramids of Giza, the Great Wall of China, etc. All of these are attached to religion, or at least a supernatural belief in the person driving it.

[ecesena]

I’d say a combination of other suggestions I see:

1. study past examples

2. focus on a selected group that you can incentivize to donate/invest for prestige or similar

3. use money to pay people that make day to day progress

4. what’s unclear to me is how do you make the project continue after your time, you should probably reserve some of the money to plan for this (back to point 1)

[softwaredoug]

Have you done research on historical precedents for this work? What comes to mind are great works like cathedrals or projects that like the Great Wall of china which was on again / off again over millennia centuries.

In science fiction there’s very long term projects such as in Dune or Foundation which the authors put a great deal of thought into.

[codingdave]

You pay them a fair salary, and offer good benefits.

[waqasaday]

What if this is like building a small community garden that is not open for public.

[paulcole]

You can’t. They have to incentivize themselves.

[alxmng]

What is it you’re thinking of building?

[waqasaday]

A forest

[fbrncci]

Money.

[victorsup]

personal charisma