I can buy almost any input. Expertise, speed, access, somebody else's mistake at the moment they need to be rid of it. Most constraints, at a certain point, stop being constraints and become line items.

There is one exception and it is absolute. I have never once been able to buy an earlier start.

The Swiss House and the Twenty Years I Did Not Have

I noticed this properly at the estate in Switzerland, which is a strange place to have a realization about arithmetic.

There is an orchard there that somebody planted a very long time before I arrived. I did not plant it, I cannot plant one like it, and if I decided today that I wanted an eighty-year-old orchard the only available route would be to buy a different property that already had one. The trees are not purchasable. Only the land they are standing on is.

It sounds like a small observation. It reorganized how I think about nearly everything, because it is the shape of the only real scarcity in my life. Anything that had to accrue over a period longer than I have left cannot be acquired by me at any price. I can only own things other people started.

The Two Categories Everything Sorts Into

So I sort things by whether they can be bought or only grown.

Bought: capacity, information, most kinds of competence, physical assets, other people's finished work. All of it available, immediately, at a price, and the price is rarely the binding constraint.

Grown: reputation, trust, a bench of people who have worked together long enough to disagree productively, a corpus of anything, an institution's habits. None of it available at any price. Every one of them requires a number of years that must actually elapse.

The second list is where the durable advantages live, and the reason they are durable is precisely that nobody can shortcut them — including me, with all of my resources. That is a much better moat than being clever.

“You can hire the whole team,” a man told me during a negotiation, when I asked him what he thought his company actually was. “You can't hire the nine years they've been arguing with each other.”

He was right, and it cost me more to agree with him than I had planned to spend.

What This Realization Cost Me, Arriving Late

It arrived when I was in my fifties, which is roughly the worst time to learn that the scarce input is years.

Everything I had built to that point had been built with the buyable inputs, because those were the ones I was good at deploying. I was very effective at converting money into capability. What I had not been doing was starting things whose value came only from duration, because those look like nothing for a long time and I was constitutionally impatient about looking like nothing.

There are two or three things I would have begun in my thirties if I had understood this. Not investments — the kind of thing that only becomes anything after twenty-five years of unremarkable continuation. I did not begin them. They are not available to me now, and no amount of what I have accumulated since substitutes.

That is the most expensive thing I have ever not done, and I cannot put a figure on it, and the fact that I cannot is exactly the point.

The Question I Put to Younger People, Once

When somebody in their twenties or thirties asks me something and I have exactly one thing to offer, it is this: what are you starting that only works if you keep doing it for twenty years?

Not as advice. I do not know their circumstances and I am wary of men in my position issuing instructions about how a life should be arranged. But it is the question I would want asked of me at that age, and nobody asked it.

Usually the answer is nothing, which is not a criticism. At that age everything is urgent and a twenty-year horizon is not a real object. It was not a real object to me either.

The orchard is not particularly beautiful and produces more than anyone at the house can use. I walk through it most mornings I am there. Somebody I will never know decided to plant it, and it is the thing on that property I would least like to be without.

Note: Victor Draemont is a character, and these notes are written in his voice. Nothing here is financial, investment, tax, or legal advice, and nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell, or gamble on anything.