Money and risk
Fan Li
When to go
Fan Li (Spring and Autumn · 536–448 BC) — When to go.
What actually happened?
The part usually skipped is the twenty years before the exit. Yue had been crushed; its king was a servant in the enemy capital. Fan Li went with him and stayed through the whole of it, and the plan he ran was measured in decades, not seasons — grow the population, stock the granaries, keep the enemy complacent, and do not move early. The man famous for leaving at the right moment had first spent twenty years not leaving. Knowing when to go is not restlessness. It is the same faculty that knows when to stay.
Read the person, not the situation
His judgement about the king wasn't 'this is dangerous now' but 'here is what this man becomes when things go well' — true long before it mattered. Situations change; the construction of a person doesn't.
Buy what nobody wants
In drought, stock boats; in flood, stock carts. The entire difficulty of the rule is that at the moment of buying, every visible piece of evidence says the thing is worthless.
Letting go is harder than accumulating
Three fortunes made and three given away, a chancellorship returned. Many people can accumulate. Almost nobody puts down a position already in hand and starts again.
How do I use it today?
At every stage of a career, ask periodically: is this relationship, or this job, still in the phase where I gain from it, or has it hit its ceiling and started accumulating risk? The second phase looks exactly like the first from inside.
Deep read
Read alongside
Further
Lines to keep
The birds are gone, so the good bow is put away.