Practicing Wisdom — Issue #13
1. What I Learned This Week
Theme: Power compounds where patience meets infrastructure.
This week’s material kept circling the same truth from wildly different angles: the biggest advantages in the world aren’t clever—they’re slow, infrastructural, and invisible until it’s too late.
Scott Galloway’s piece on rare earths reads, on the surface, like geopolitics. But underneath, it’s really about time horizons. China didn’t win rare earth dominance with brilliance; it won by being willing to invest for decades in something unsexy, dirty, and politically boring. Rare earths aren’t rare—long-term thinking is. The U.S. didn’t lose because it lacked resources. It lost because it optimized for quarterly optics instead of generational leverage.
That same idea shows up again in a totally different domain: corporate cashflow. In Not All Cash Is Created Equal, cash is reframed not as a static balance, but as a system of pipes, valves, and pressure points. Small operational decisions—payment terms, inventory cadence, CapEx timing—can quietly amplify or suffocate a business. Cashflow is not an accounting outcome; it’s organizational behavior made visible. The best CFOs don’t manage spreadsheets, they manage decision rights.
Then zoom out even further, into AI. Both the David George and Gavin Baker conversations point to the same conclusion: AI’s winners will not be the cleverest demos, but the players who control compute, energy, data, and time. The frontier models are impressive, but the real moat is who can afford to think longer, train larger, and wait out cycles of overinvestment and skepticism. In other words, AI is not a software story—it’s an infrastructure story disguised as magic.
Across geopolitics, corporate finance, and AI, the pattern is identical:
Short-term intelligence loses to long-term commitment.
Speed loses to stamina.
Optimization loses to ownership.
Power doesn’t come from being right early. It comes from staying solvent long enough to be right eventually.
Sources Referenced
Not all Cash is Created Equal: Cashflow Mastery I — SecretCFO (link)
Gavin Baker — Invest Like the Best (link)
David George — Invest Like the Best (link)
Rare Earths — Scott Galloway, No Mercy / No Malice (link)
2. Key Distillations
“Rare isn’t the resource—patience is.”
Cashflow is behavior, not bookkeeping.
The most valuable assets don’t look valuable while they’re being built.
Infrastructure is destiny, wearing boring clothes.
If you can’t survive the waiting, you don’t get the compounding.
3. One Contrarian Viewpoint
America’s problem isn’t innovation—it’s attention span.
The dominant narrative says the U.S. is “falling behind” because it’s less capable or less talented. That’s wrong. The U.S. still leads in innovation, talent, and capital.
What it lacks is institutional patience.
We over-rotate toward moonshots and underinvest in maintenance. We celebrate founders and neglect stewards. We treat long-term investment as political risk rather than national strategy.
China didn’t outplay the U.S. in rare earths with genius—it simply kept showing up while everyone else got bored.
4. One Investable Idea
The next great advantage is “boring leverage.”
Whether in markets or companies, the most mispriced assets right now are those tied to:
Physical infrastructure (energy, materials, logistics)
Cashflow efficiency (not growth optics)
Compute and power arbitrage
Long-duration industrial capacity
The opportunity isn’t a new app. It’s owning the pipes that everyone else depends on but doesn’t want to build.
In a world obsessed with speed, the edge belongs to whoever can afford to wait.
5. From the Archives: A Recall Highlight
“The most dangerous assumption is that tomorrow will look like today—just faster.”
