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“If your plan is for one year, plant rice. If your plan is for ten years, plant trees. If your plan is for one hundred years, educate children.”
Guan Zhong
I put off a book for 15 years and finished it before lunch.
Publishing the book was a morning of formatting.
The book came out of a notebook. From 2013 on I read my principles each day. Now and then I copied them onto a fresh page by hand to keep them in front of me. By 2019 that page held 100 rules.
Those 100 rules became the book I published five years later.
In 1988 Johan Cruyff took over Barcelona’s soccer team and made the kids in the club’s youth academy play the same way his professional players did. He coached there for eight years and the club kept his system after he left. 22 years later Messi, Iniesta and Xavi finished first, second and third in the vote for the world’s best player, all three out of that academy.
I think of Cruyff whenever I start something new and want to see results inside a week.
Sir Richard Weston backed the king in England’s civil war and Parliament seized his estates. In the five years that followed he wrote a book he never meant to publish. From Ghent and Bruges he watched Flemish farmers work their fields and sent letters home to his sons.
English farmers often rested a third of their land each year so the soil could recover. The Flemish planted clover on that resting third instead. Wheat needs nitrogen and clover pulls it out of the air into the soil, so the third that rested also fed the next crop.
Samuel Hartlib printed Weston’s letters to his sons in 1650 and the practice spread. Farmers in Norfolk stopped resting their third and sowed it instead. Their wheat averaged 14 bushels an acre in the early 1700s and 23 by the early 1800s.
Weston died in 1652, roughly 150 years before those 23-bushel harvests.
I publish each day without knowing which posts will outlive me.
Cornelius Vanderbilt spent his life building the family’s railroad fortune. His grandson William Kissam inherited $55,000,000 of that fortune in 1885. He died in 1920 with $54,530,966.
In 1901 the grandson told the Minneapolis Journal:
“It has left me with nothing to hope for, with nothing definite to seek or strive for. Inherited wealth is a big handicap to happiness.”
Keeping it was the job he was handed.
The day starts before the day starts.
What you do inside one day, season, career or generation is what the next one starts with.
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What could you do today that tomorrow depends on?
