# What won’t change in the next ten years? **Build your life on the answer.** By [Gustavo Mucho Love](https://kanboombo.com/gustavo-mucho-love/) Jeff Bezos says he is asked all the time what will change in the next ten years. He is almost never asked what won’t. And he says the second question is the more important one. > “I very frequently get the question: ‘What’s going to change in the next 10 years?’ And that is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one. I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’ And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two — because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time.” > > “In our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that’s going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection.” > > “When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.” > > — Jeff Bezos, AWS re:Invent, 2012 The best long-term thinkers each ask a version of the same question. Warren Buffett asks: what compounds? > “Time is the friend of the wonderful business, the enemy of the mediocre.” > > “If you aren’t willing to own a stock for ten years, don’t even think about owning it for ten minutes.” > > “Our favorite holding period is forever.” > > — Warren Buffett, letters to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway, 1988, 1989 and 1996 Jeff Bezos asks: what stays true? Bill Gates asks: what are we underestimating? > “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.” > > — Bill Gates, The Road Ahead, 1996 In two years, the hype is too high. In ten, our imagination is too small. Peter Drucker asks: what future are today’s decisions making? > “Long-range planning does not deal with future decisions. It deals with the futurity of present decisions.” > > — Peter Drucker, Management Science, 1959 You don’t manage 2036 in 2036. You manage it today. Alan Kay asks: what can we invent instead of predict? > “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” > > — Alan Kay, Xerox PARC, 1971 And Charlie Munger asks the question under all the others. Can you wait? > “…make a few great investments and just sit back and wait.” > > — Charlie Munger, USC Business School, 1994 Compound. Find what stays true. Respect the decade. Decide today. Invent. Wait. Now ask it of a life. What will still be true about you in ten years? You will still be short of time. You will still need a calendar. The books that formed the world will still be worth your time. They have outlasted every prediction made about them. And you will still want to be understood, by people who do not speak your language yet. So that is what we built on. One portion a day for ten years is 3,650 portions. Nobody reads the Republic in a day. Almost anybody can read it a few pages at a time. That is compounding. It asks only what Munger asked. **Can you wait?** ## Sources Where each line comes from, and the lines we left out. - **What won’t change.** The passage quoted above. He had said the same of low prices, fast delivery and selection to Harvard Business Review in October 2007. Jeff Bezos in conversation with Werner Vogels, AWS re:Invent, Las Vegas, 29 November 2012. - **Ten years, ten minutes.** On the same page he asks for a business “whose earnings are virtually certain to be materially higher five, ten and twenty years from now.” Warren Buffett, letter to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway, 1996. - **Forever.** Of outstanding businesses with outstanding managements. Warren Buffett, letter to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway, 1988. - **Time is the friend.** From his “mistakes of the first twenty-five years”. Warren Buffett, letter to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway, 1989. - **Two years and ten.** The line goes on: “Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction.” Bill Gates, The Road Ahead, revised edition (Penguin, 1996), Afterword. - **The futurity of present decisions.** Often quoted as “the future of present decisions”. He wrote “futurity”. Peter F. Drucker (1959). Long-Range Planning — Challenge to Management Science. Management Science, 5(3), 238–249. - **Invent it.** Often credited to Drucker or to Lincoln. It is Kay’s, after Gabor. Alan Kay, at a meeting at Xerox PARC in 1971, by his own account. Dennis Gabor had written in Inventing the Future (1963): “The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented.” - **Wait.** As the linked transcript has it; transcripts of the talk differ in their wording. Two lines often credited to him, “the first rule of compounding…” and “the big money is… in the waiting”, are left out: we could not find where he said them. Charlie Munger, “A Lesson on Elementary, Worldly Wisdom as It Relates to Investment Management and Business”, USC Business School, 1994. ## Read next - [Leaders learn languages.](https://kanboombo.com/languages/): Because you will always seek connection. - [If you want to keep your brain young, give it something hard to do.](https://kanboombo.com/languages/keep-your-brain-young/): Learn another language. ## You will always be short of time. Kanboombo puts the books that formed the world beside the language you are learning, one portion a day, on your calendar. Tap a word to keep it, and it comes back just before you would forget it. Free to read and to sign up.