I have seen disaster, and I know how it sounds like. Disaster sounds like rush, panic. One of the worst things that can happen in someone’s life is to attempt to compete against time. To attempt to play catch up and rush up things. I see this syndrome tends to hit people post 35 years of age.
I receive lots of advice, from various friends and family. And most of the advice is usually a manifestation of their own fears, but also one that commits that error of ‘rush.’ Past 35 years of age, when people are expected to play long-term games, that’s when they instead rush. I have seen people rush back for academic degree upgrades simply because everyone was doing it.
I have seen people invest in various asset classes, simply because that’s what the cohort was doing and there was never another chance to make the same investment. I say, there will always be a good investment for the person that plays the long-term game. Wealth is a long-term endeavour. The Ortega Group is established on those fundamentals. We do not mind being wrong and misunderstood in the short term, but we are certain, we must be right in the long-term.
As a young boy, I always looked forward to the last laugh. I took the rare paths that most people avoided. My career has been defined by detours and it’s those detours that have made the difference. While most of my University classmates concentrated on the engineering course, I took time on the side to work with Daily Monitor. I searched for these intersections.
I repeat, always avoid the rush. Avoid mistakes that accrue out of the panic, the rush. The long-term is the only weighing scale. What people are doing now, what they project to be doing shouldn’t be of concern. The only concern is the path you have chosen and dedicated a life to.
To develop this thinking, I often ask people; ‘what’s the one thing you could spend 10 years building?’ If you picked just one thing and decided to keep building brick by brick for the next decade, what is that thing? For me, Ortega Group is that 10-year project. Everyday I wake up to add a brick to it. It’s the forest that I am planting. It’s the ecosystem that I am building. And forests are not built through panic. Panic is never a strategy. Rushing is never a strategy. On this hill, I will die.