During a gale late last November, a tree blew down in our garden.
We’re just a mile from the sea, in an elevated position, and given the wind strength, it wasn’t a surprise. Indeed, it’s happened before, in earlier gales.
This tree, however, was a truly massive conifer – a vast, sprawling affair that in falling managed to break branches off from no fewer than four other trees, including an apple tree and two large oaks.
It would be an understatement to say that my heart sank when I saw the damage the following morning. Most of the lawn was submerged underneath branches and conifer fronds.
I set to work the following weekend. First stop: the garden centre for a new pair of loppers: as much of the tree as possible would need to be chopped into small pieces, so as to facilitate burning in a tightly-packed bonfire.
The long slog
Progress that first weekend was dispiritingly slow. Painfully, painfully slow.
It’s been a wet winter, and bad weather dogged successive weekends, as did poor light in the late afternoons, as the days grew ever shorter. I’d work for hours, with little visible progress to show for it.
My chainsaw – always a bit temperamental when it comes to starting – wasn’t helping an old shoulder injury, and so I grasped the nettle and bought a new one.
Gradually, though, the bonfire grew larger, and the tangle of green foliage became smaller. Bare branches began to emerge, and were duly cut into logs, and stacked.
We were away for Christmas, but coming home I was quite startled to see quite how much progress had been made – something that wasn’t necessarily so apparent when looking at the fallen tree on a day-to-day basis.
Steady gains
By the end of January, I was on a roll.
With every passing weekend, more lawn was reclaimed. The bonfire in the orchard had reached truly massive proportions: I was joking to friends that if I wanted it any bigger, I’d have to get planning permission.
By mid-February, only a few cut-off branches remained to be processed, with most of the trunk cut, logged, and stacked.
And today, as I write these words, most of the job is complete – just a further weekend’s work remains.
Most noticeably, areas of lawn that were buried under dense, wet, compressed conifer foliage just a few weeks ago are now resplendent with daffodils, splashes of yellow heralding the coming spring.
You start with a single footstep
Last weekend, cutting and sawing while dodging squalls of rain and hail, it suddenly came to me that the whole episode had a lot of parallels with investing.
At first, the task appears too daunting to contemplate. Wealth is unattainable, you think. Early progress appears derisory: dividends are minuscule, capital gains measured pitifully small amounts.
But sustained effort brings rewards. There comes a point when genuine progress is recognisable, and unarguable. Momentum begins to build; reinvested dividends slowly but irresistibly propelling your net worth upwards.
There are setbacks, to be sure. Adversity must be weathered; spirits maintained; gloom averted.
But week by week, progress continues. And – looking back – the realisation dawns that perhaps the hardest part was actually starting.
Focus on the finish
It’s difficult to overstate the importance of this kind of analogy. Time and again, I see investors – or would-be, wannabe investors – make the same mistakes.
Failing to start. Over-trading. Over-reacting to every piece of newsflow, good and bad. Measuring themselves over the short term, not the long term. And so on, and so on.
And I’m sure that much of time, they aren’t unaware of what they’re doing, nor unaware that what they’re doing is inadvisable.
It’s just that emotions are difficult things, clouding investors’ judgement. Gloom one moment, euphoria the next.
Better by far, it’s always seemed to me, is a policy of just ploughing on: playing a long game, in other words, and not a short one. Have an objective; know where you’re headed – and keep going until you get there.
