In these pages, you'll find me talking a lot about how things compound and about how the slow drip, drip, drip over time builds things that are impressive and secure and sound and how (mostly) if we think about the long term when the long term arrives we're much better because we thought about it.
And so, I can talk about investing your money or developing your skills or intangible assets, as Oliver Burkeman calls them, and I can talk about buying a house. I can talk about just doing the right thing day by day, but one of the areas that compound the most over time is support networks.
The thing about support networks is that you have to build them, and they require all sorts of things that are intangible and really fragile and really difficult to construct, like integrity, trust, reliance, and honesty.
The thing about support networks is that they are symbiotic.
And so, in one instant, someone you know might need an enormous amount of support, and then in another, it may be you.
The way the world has gotten (certainly to my old eyes) is that almost everybody is becoming obsessed with right now, financing this, leveraging that, the private equity cycle or short courses which are 5 minutes long because we need snackable content because nobody has any sort of attention span anymore and we pander for the today or the tomorrow and we forget to tell people about the importance of a year from now, or 10 years from now, or further on from that.
Perhaps the greatest example of a support network is marriage, as I see it. Marriage is difficult (probably a lot of the time for a lot of people), and you've heard me say that thing that I love my wife every day, but I don't like her every day, but the thing about the marriage support network is that when you need the help most, if you've invested in it and done it as a partnership, you're probably likely to get the help that you need, exactly when you need it.
The same is true for friendships, colleagues, and professional relationships.
You should always be kind on the way up, shouldn't you? Because you're always going to need someone when you're on your way back down, and you are coming back down, or else dying first, and dying is a less palatable option.
To think that we will not need a support network at some point is arrogance beyond belief, and to suggest that it wouldn't be right to invest in that support network now and think that we can accumulate enough money to buy a support network later is extremely naive.
Blog Post Number - 4119