Taking the Long View
Do hard things, have adventures, and build wealth over time.
I recently read Chris Cole’s excellent research paper, The Allegory of the Hawk and Serpent: How To Grow And Protect Wealth For 100 Years.
As I was taking notes, I felt there was a question I needed to answer first.
Why would someone want to build a 100-year portfolio in the first place?
Or to put a finer point on it, why would I as a single dude who enjoys working in wild places where they shoot AK-47s in the air to celebrate life milestones want to possibly take such a long view on investing?
Short answer - It is an adventure with no end.
I don’t know if taking the long view is the right move for you, everyone has a different personality and different goals in life.
But I can explain why I enjoy it.
Learning From Marcus
Sitting in a room with ten grey bearded village elders, their weathered faces carefully blank, I was being schooled on the 2,200 year old similarities between US warfighting doctrine and Alexander the Great.
“Like Alexander, you started your campaign in the Balkans during the Bosnian War, then you went to the middle east, invading Iraq, just like Alexander did conquering the Persian Empire, and now here you are, years later, in Afghanistan, like Alexander.”
The elder finished with a polite smile as he set his tea cup down on the table,
“And also like Alexander, the US will be here for a long time, then you too will leave.”
Realizing I needed to expand my view of time and events, I started reading Meditations.
Why Meditations?
It roughly matched the timeframe the Afghans were using for their view of events, and I didn’t want to read a biography from a modern historian who had never lived the reality that is Afghanistan.
Marcus Aurelius dealt with the same issues I was struggling with two millennia later.
In Meditations, he discusses all aspects of leadership, being constant with a clear mind, not becoming upset and instead trying to get to the heart of the disagreement for the benefit of all, dealing justly with people despite their ungratefulness, knowing when to show mercy, and realizing even our best efforts will soon amount to nothing as we all face death.
As I applied this over the years in practice, at first it was a chore, trying to recognize participants only acted in their own best interest, and teaching myself to focus past the immediate effects for the strategic win - the long view.
This eventually turned into a challenge I enjoyed once I could see the effects taking the long view on issues had within the community.
As Voltaire concludes Candide with, “We must cultivate our own garden.”
A List Of Wants Named “Not This”
For 27 months, through attacks and every day life, I only had what I could fit in a backpack – a change of clothes, gym clothes, macbook, fighting kit…the Louis Vuitton sunglasses lol.
I took R&Rs to Italy, Istanbul, and traveled the Silk Road.
But always there was that return helo flight after long plane rides, the sound of the rotors thundering back off the mountains announcing the approach to camp.
Eventually I went back to the US.
Rolling up the door on my storage unit, it was strange looking at things that used to be important to me, a thin layer of dust coating old dreams of a different version of me.
After happily living with so little, where the best part of the day was the first cup of coffee in the morning stillness, silently watching the shadows yield to daylight across the snow covered Hindu Kush, I rolled the door back down, called an estate sale company, and sold almost everything I owned.
Didn’t know what I was searching for, and if you had asked me, I wouldn’t have been able to articulate it besides saying, “not this”
If I was circling 7-8’s on the 1-10 smiley face scale in Afghanistan, now that I’m back in the first world, I am still circling 8’s, but feeling restless.
I started wondering what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
The list was short - Go back overseas, keep traveling, get my deadlift to 500 lbs.
I went to the Sudan.
Still Haven’t Found What I Am Looking For
The picture at the beginning of this article is the ancient city of Naqa, from the Kingdom of Kush, 300 BC.
Once a strategic city for trade from the Nile to the east, Naqa is now only reachable by driving across the desert and wind swept wadis following GPS coordinates.
A buddy and I took a 4x4 land cruiser, drove for hours, through two police checkpoints outside the capital of Khartoum, turned right off the two lane highway into the desert at the first set of coordinates and drove off through the desert, no road, just sand coating the windows and billowing behind the cruiser as we crossed the wadis heading towards the second set of coordinates.
You start to wonder if it is really out there, until going around a bend, and there it is rising out of the desert, a 2,300-year-old city, forgotten to the modern world.
Walking around Naqa puts life in perspective.
Seeing the deeds of Kings and Queens of Kush carved into rock of what was once a great city, having repelled Assyrians, then Romans, now forgotten.
The desert slowly retaking the ruins as the wind howls makes a person realize their own insignificant to the passage of time and events in this world.
If Meditations was the foundation for me, then quiet professionalism is the day-to-day application.
I was good at what I did. But I also realized working overseas, traveling, and the gym wasn’t enough.
I needed another mission.
One that was my own, that I could shape individually, that no one else decided on but me, and couldn’t be taken away from me.
The 100-year portfolio
I found long-term generational wealth building nearly by accident when I read this Forbes article on Beretta.
It amazed me a company started in 1526 would still be in the same family nearly 500 years later.
As I tried to put this into context, I realized the Berettas had been quietly running their business for over 150 years before King Jan III Sobieski led the winged hussars in the largest cavalry charge in history, smashing the Ottoman flank and saving Vienna in 1683.
The Ottoman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire, titans of the time, both now gone, and the Beretta family business continues.
As the modern country of Italy was founded in 1861, the family business was almost 350 years old.
World wars, depressions, rises and falls of states, the family continued.
Growing up lower middle class, this was a revolutionary idea to me!
I then read Family Fortunes: How to Build Family Wealth and Hold on to It for 100 Years .
In Khartoum I applied the same relentless focus I had applied to studying Taliban tactics to learning macroeconomics, geopolitics, investing, and trading.
I had my new mission.
There is a lot of overlap from working overseas to the world of finance.
Similar to the dangers overseas, in markets no one keeps me safe but myself. It always comes down to emotional control, clear decision-making, and risk management.
For me, investing for 100 years is a beautiful challenge with no end, only an always evolving and changing landscape of markets, opponents, geopolitics, and new situations to be thought through and acted on.
It is fun.
That is why I am building a 100-year portfolio.
It is a mission that is totally mine, and exactly what I was looking for. - RC