The Acorn
A note to my friends who are building something meant to outlast them.
I have been thinking lately about what we are actually making when we think we are making money.
Most of us start a company to solve a problem and, if we are honest, to win. We keep score in dollars because dollars are easy to count. But dollars are a strange thing to measure a life by. They are the most perishable asset we own. They inflate, they get spent, they get divided up and forgotten. A fortune is a sandcastle built at the tide line — impressive for an afternoon, gone by morning, and the ocean does not even notice.
The oldest people I can find in the record seem to have understood this better than we do.
The man who gave it all away
Andrew Carnegie spent the first half of his life building the largest steel company in the world, and in 1901 he sold it to J.P. Morgan for roughly four hundred and eighty million dollars — an almost unimaginable sum then. He was, for a moment, perhaps the richest man alive.
And then he spent the second half of his life trying to get rid of it.
He gave away close to ninety percent of his fortune before he died — libraries, universities, concert halls, the Peace Palace at The Hague. He had written the reason down years earlier, in an essay called The Gospel of Wealth: a man of great fortune is not an owner but a trustee, and "the man who dies rich dies disgraced."
I used to read that as a line about charity. I don't anymore. I think it is a line about physics. Carnegie had figured out that money, left as money, decays. The only way to keep it was to convert it into something that doesn't — a building, an institution, a mind educated, a child who grows up with access to a book he could not have afforded. He was moving his wealth out of the currency that rots and into the currency that lasts.
That currency is lives touched. It is the only asset I know of that compounds after you are gone.
A translator in the family
There is a man in my family's past named Nathan Haskell Dole. He was a Boston man of letters at the turn of the last century — an editor and a translator. He translated Tolstoy for American readers, and he translated the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, the thousand-year-old Persian verses about kings and gardens and dust.
I didn't grow up knowing his name. I went looking, the way you do when you start wondering where your own instincts came from, and there he was: a man who spent his working life carrying other people's words across centuries and languages so that they would not be lost. He did not get rich doing it. But I am sitting here, generations later, reading Omar Khayyám in part because a relative of mine refused to let those lines die in a language no one around him could read.
That is the whole idea in one person. Khayyám wrote the verses nine hundred years ago. Dole carried them forward a hundred years ago. I am holding them now. Somewhere in there, a thing that should have vanished a dozen times over is still alive, passed hand to hand, each person adding nothing but the decision to pass it on.
Owning the implementation
Here is where the entrepreneur comes back in, because I don't want this to read like a sermon about giving your money away. It isn't.
Steve Jobs, talking to a room of business students at MIT in 1992, said something I have never been able to shake. He was asked about consultants — smart people who come in, study a company, and leave a recommendation behind. And he said: "Coming in and making recommendations and not owning the results, not owning the implementation, I think is a fraction of the value, and a fraction of the opportunity to learn and get better."
He meant it as a critique of consulting. But I think he accidentally described the whole difference between a life that echoes and a life that doesn't.
Opinions are cheap. Advice is cheap. Even money, it turns out, is cheap — you can give it away in an afternoon. What is expensive, what actually costs you something, is building the thing, running it for years, carrying it through the stages where it could die, accumulating the scar tissue, and staying long enough to see who it changed. That is ownership. That is implementation. That is the part that compounds.
An entrepreneur is someone who refuses to only make the recommendation.
The acorn
Which brings me to the acorn, and to why this little publication is named for one.
An acorn is a preposterous object. It is small enough to lose in the grass, and inside it is the complete, patient blueprint for a tree that can live a thousand years, shelter things that aren't born yet, and drop ten thousand more acorns long after the squirrel that buried this one is dust. The oak does not experience its own reach. It will never stand in its own shade.
That is the trade I think the best builders are actually making, whether or not they can say it out loud. You will not be there for most of what you start. The reach of a good thing runs out past the edge of your own life, into rooms you'll never enter, to people who will never know your name. The acorn doesn't need the credit. It just needs to be real, and buried, and given time.
So this is the premise of everything I'm going to write here.
Stop measuring your reach in dollars. Dollars are the sandcastle. Start measuring it the way an oak would, if an oak could count — in lives touched, and in how far down the years that touch still travels after you've gone quiet.
That is the real ten-x. Not ten times the money. Ten times the distance.
Plant accordingly.
— Damien