TIME
This too will pass.
Time. Our worst enemy, or our most cherished friend?It’s Sunday morning; I’m supposed to be on a flight to Boston for a board meeting. But of course these are the days of COVID-19, and I’m not going anywhere. Nor is anyone else. Not that there isn’t work to do – thanks to technology most of us can work remotely, and there’s plenty of it to do. As an investor, and typically a contrarian investor, these times of crisis are typically great times to invest.
But today, instead of preparing for that board meeting, I put down the iPhone and MacBook and looked out to see a glorious California spring day. And from this vantage point, looking out across the hills to the San Francisco Bay, the world looks the same – no masks, gloves, or scared people backing away from each other in the local grocery store to insure the proper “social distance” is maintained. Just trees and fields and bright skies – and a lot more birds than I remember.
This – C19 – will pass. Our species is resilient. We have about one-million years give of take of DNA that has evolved. We’ve been hardened by famine and drought and plague for millennia before we had advanced far enough as a species to record all of the terrifying challenges we endured. And then we did start chronicling the pestilence that stalked our ancestors, it’s a pretty bleak story.
The Plague of Justinian in the 6th Century, perhaps the first recorded occurrence of the Bubonic plague, is thought to have killed between 30 – 50M. Skip ahead to the 14thcentury, and The Black Death – this time the Bubonic plague for sure – claimed two-thirds of the population of the Western World – perhaps as many as 200M. A half a dozen or so subsequent pandemics before the 20thcentury claimed many millions more, and the infamous Spanish Flu late in the second decade of last century is thought to have killed 50M across the globe. And yet here we are. Resilient.
With each passing disease, the human herd has adapted; new anti-bodies have developed, eventually new immunities to the latest threat. And for all but about the last one-hundred years or so of a million, there were no drugs or drug companies to aid in the battle. Just time, truly the great healer.
With more springs behind me than ahead, I guess I think more about time these days than I did when I was chasing girls in foreign ports, and even later, when I was chasing product problems as a young IBM engineer. I’m less likely to squander time these days. I’m more sensitive to those whom I really care about in my life. It’s a short list. And I’m also keenly aware of what matters to me – and the importance of prioritizing. The heady days of changing the world are far behind me. Even as a young man of the 60’s, the lofty ideals of those days were blunted by the hard edge of reality, for while my peers were growing their hair and waving banners of peace and love and free dope, I was training to be a Naval Officer. Vietnam was raging, and it wasn’t a popular time to be in uniform. But Time is a healer of broken bodies and of damaged nations.
So all thoughts of fleeting springs aside, I’m back to the realities of time and priorities. No, COVID-19 is not the end of civilization. In fact, in the spectrum of pandemics, it hardly shows up on the screen. And while in the middle of this crisis, it’s easy to imagine that “Corona will change everything; our lives will never be the same.” It won’t, and they will – eventually. Time. I’m a mercenary – I’m not ashamed to admit it. But those who put their faith and money behind me are too. They expect a return on their investment, and they expect me to deliver it to them. And maybe what we are doing here at Wisdom is not as noble as saving the whales, but providing capital to US military veterans with great business ideas is not a bad way to spend one’s remaining time. Because whether you’re saving a whale, delivering software that helps industries design and visual new products, or software that helps hospitals deal with C19, running a brewery, or just closing a sale, it’s important to be remember that time is on your side.