The Really Long Game

New Book Alert: The Long Game

My new book, The Long Game, is available for pre-order now. The book contains reflections from 30 investors who’ve survived decades of market cycles. You’ll learn how to tune out the noise that makes you second-guess yourself, handle the fear and greed that hurt your decisions, and stick to principles that actually compound wealth over time. Shipping starts end of February 2026.

Click Here to Pre-Order Now

---

This story is from the 1860s. The administrators of New College, Oxford, discovered that the huge oak beams in their Great Hall were rotting. Some of these beams were two feet thick and forty feet long.

In 19th-century England, finding oaks of that size was nearly impossible. The college was staring at a collapsing roof with no obvious way to fix it.

Then someone suggested they call the college’s land agent.

He took them to a grove on the college’s own grounds, and told them, “We’ve been growing these for you since the 1300s.”

When the college was founded five centuries earlier, the original architects knew those beams would rot one day. So, they planted a grove of oaks for a problem they would never live to see, and for people they would never meet.

Now, as per historians, the full story is more complicated. The grove wasn’t necessarily planted with this single purpose in mind, but it was more likely just generations of foresters doing what good foresters do, which is growing oaks patiently and never cutting what wasn’t ready.

It was simply an act of stewardship.

Now, what I find most striking about this story is that for five hundred years, those trees were, by any measurable standard, doing nothing. They were not generating revenue or yielding any visible return.

In modern finance parlance, it was like “dead capital,” and the land could have been used for something more immediately useful and “profitable.”

And yet, when the moment finally came, the trees were exactly the right age, thanks to a culture that understood that some things simply take time.

I think about this story a lot. Especially now, given that we live in times when patience is considered a character flaw.

You just need to observe how most of us behave with our money, careers, relationships, and attention. It feels irresponsible to be doing nothing. In fact, this “act” of doing nothing (yes, inaction is also action) looks, from the outside, almost embarrassingly naive.

And you know what the worst part is? It’s that this short-termism doesn’t feel like a flaw when you’re inside it. On the contrary, it feels like prudence, because you think you’re paying attention so that you’re not caught off guard while the world around moves at a rapid pace.

But there’s a difference between “information” and “wisdom.” Information is about now. Wisdom is about time. And playing a longer game—like foresters who plant oak trees do—and one that most people around you are not playing, requires the latter, not the former.

Now, here’s what that game actually asks of you.

It asks you to do work today whose benefits you may not see for years, or not at all.

It asks you to look wrong for long stretches, because looking wrong in the short run and being right in the long run are sometimes the same thing.

It asks you to sit with discomfort, where people around you are making money on things you’ve passed on, and not let that discomfort change your behaviour.

All this is genuinely hard. It runs against our instinct to respond to threats and to prefer a bad decision made quickly over a good one made slowly.

The Oxford foresters didn’t overcome this instinct through some extraordinary act of will. They overcame it by building a culture passed from one forester to the next, so consistently that the long view became automatic. The patience was baked into the institution. It didn’t depend on any one person being unusually wise.

That’s what also makes the best investors we read and know about. They invest with a philosophy held firmly enough that it carries them through the periods when everything around them is screaming to abandon it.

Most people can’t plant a grove they’ll never sit under. That’s just human nature. But it means that the ones who genuinely can have a field nearly to themselves.

This question, about what separates the investors who stay the course from the ones who intend to but don’t, is one I couldn’t stop thinking about. And so, I spent the last several months going looking for answers. I spoke to investment practitioners who’ve navigated good and bad markets, watched their own conviction tested in real time, and come through it. I asked them what they’d learned.

That search became a book. I’ve called it The Long Game.

It isn’t about stock-picking or finding the next great idea. It’s about something prior to all of that: how to build the temperament that makes the rest possible.

It’s about how to think about time which, in our world of investing, is the most important thing of all.

It’s the book I wish I’d had in my own early years as an investor.

I don’t know what the market will do in the next month. In fact, nobody does, whatever they may tell you.

But I do know that the people who will look back on this period with equanimity are the ones who, right now, are tending their groves. Who understand that the discomfort of this moment is not a problem to be solved but a test to be passed.

I’ll end with a lesson I learned from my grandmother as a ten-year-old. I still have a vivid image of her living each day unhurried and never anxious about what came next. And yet, every morning, she tended the mango trees she had planted in our bagaan with the same care.

I asked her once why she bothered. The trees were young. Fruit was still years away.

She said, “Tend them today, and one day they will feed you and people you haven’t met yet.”

My grandmother wasn’t sacrificing the present for the future, and neither was she ignoring the future for the present. She was doing both, simultaneously.

The Oxford foresters knew this. My grandmother knew this.

Maybe that’s all the long game really is. Something you practice in silence every day, without waiting for anyone, including the market, to tell you it’s working.

To the long game,

Vishal

---

Click Here to Pre-Order Now