How many assets do you need? / by Alexander Lyadov

Does a person need a lot of wealth, assets, or things? It depends on who is going to manage them. You can’t just “have” a car and leave it in the parking lot under the house. Eventually, the alarm will discharge the battery, the wheels will inflate and the oil will leak out, and the super-car will turn into a motionless metal. So you have to pay someone to inspect and walk your horse regularly. Otherwise, you won’t be able to spontaneously decide to saddle up and ride it Even with houseplants, it’s not all that simple. The watering routine is a given. But I know stories of people who couldn’t evacuate in time during the war and put themselves in danger because they couldn’t abandon their beloved flowers.

A business partner of mine used to say, “Assets are not a privilege, but a burden,” and he was right. Entropy works relentlessly against us. Weeds, rust, malice, or people’s laziness destroy everything we have. Even a fast-growing and profitable company, left unsupervised, soon begins to stall, falter, and wobble. As a result, it inevitably weakens and lags behind its competitors. In the marketplace, as in the savannah, he who has strayed from the herd becomes easy prey for predators of all stripes.

We tend to see shining examples of radical increases in business valye, but we discount the considerable but imperceptible effort it takes to simply keep assets as they are. Founders who are obsessed with novelty suffer from this in particular. They get too many promising ideas or projects in their basket, and then they don’t have time to walk around and water them. They achieve a lot but then lose just as much. However, sooner or later a revelation comes — in order to multiply something, you must first save it.

Yours sincerely,

-Alexander


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