Compounding and Long-Term Holding
Why time and reinvestment rate dominate returns, and what makes a business worth holding through cycles.
26 books · 13 people behind it · 1 reading lists
Start here
- The Psychology of MoneyMorgan Housel, 2020
- 100 BaggersChristopher W. Mayer, 2015
- Common Stocks and Uncommon ProfitsPhilip A. Fisher, 1958
The people behind it 13
Each person holds a book in this entry or names it in their own tags.
Investors 6
CM
Christopher Mayer1 book herePF
Philip Fishernamed in their tags
Warren Buffettnamed in their tagsNS
Nick Sleepnamed in their tagsPL
Philip L. Carretnamed in their tagsFR
Francois Rochonnamed in their tagsAcademics 1
Strategists 1
Journalists 5
LA
Lawrence A. Cunningham1 book hereMH
Morgan Housel1 book hereJR
John Rothchild1 book hereWG
William Green1 book hereSS
Simon Sineknamed in their tagsReading list — The best books on long-term thinking · Superbook
10 books, in the order the list argues for
This list builds an argument across ten books. It starts with the longest possible lens — the full sweep of human and pre-human history — and gradually narrows toward the practical question of how individuals and institutions might actually act differently once they have internalized what deep time reveals. The first three books establish a baseline. Dawkins's evolutionary genealogy and Harari's civilizational surve
Sources: The Long Now Foundation — seminars and resources · William MacAskill, 'What We Owe the Future' — 80,000 Hours interview · Roman Krznaric, 'The Good Ancestor' — author website · Stewart Brand on pace layers — The Long Now Blog
Books 26
Philip A. Fisher · 1958 · Scuttlebutt research and the case for holding growth compounders.
Jeremy J. Siegel · 1994 · Two centuries of real equity returns; the standard long-horizon evidence.
Philip A. Fisher · 2000 · Fisher on scuttlebutt research and holding great growth businesses.
John Rothchild · 2001 · Three generations compounding a fortune through insurance stocks
Lawrence A. Cunningham, Torkell T. Eide, Patrick Hargreaves · 2016 · What repeatable quality looks like at the business level.
Morgan Housel · 2020 · Behavioural endurance treated as the scarce input to compounding.
Philip Carret · 1995 · Reflections from a fund manager with a fifty-five-year record
T3 100 Baggers
Christopher W. Mayer · 2015 · A study of stocks that returned 100x, and what they had in common.
Oliver Burkeman · Burkeman's book on finitude is the necessary counterweight to grandiose civilizational thinking. Four thousand weeks is approximately an 80-year life, and Burkeman's argument — that productivity systems typically function as denial mechanisms against this fact — forces the question of how a mortal agent ought to orient toward long-term causes. The tension between personal finitude and multigenerational obligation is never fully resolved here, which is exactly right.
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Jared Diamond · Diamond's central question — why did some civilizations come to dominate others over 10,000 years? — is precisely the kind of question that requires long-term thinking to even ask. The answer, rooted in geography and biology rather than culture or intelligence, is a model for how to reason about slow causes and fast effects.
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Yuval Noah Harari · Where Sapiens traces the arc of the past, Homo Deus projects it forward: what does humanity want next, now that it has largely conquered famine, plague, and war? Harari's scenarios — dataism, bioengineered happiness, the merging of human and algorithm — are less predictions than a structured way of thinking about which long-term trajectories are actually available.
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Yuval Noah Harari · Harari's survey of Homo sapiens from cognitive revolution to the present makes the long-term case by compression: 70,000 years of human history in one arc. Particularly useful here for the chapters on imagined orders — how the fictions that coordinate large groups (money, laws, nations) are both load-bearing and revisable.
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Andrew WilkinsonBill GatesMohnish PabraiNat EliasonNaval RavikantShane ParrishVinod KhoslaAlfred LinAli AbdaalAna FabregaAnthony PomplianoBrett AdcockChangpeng ZhaoDaniel EkDaniel PetreDemis HassabisJames CameronJulian ShapiroJulie ZhuoKeith RaboisLi LuMarc AndreessenMark ZuckerbergMatt MullenwegMelinda GatesNiki ScevakNir EyalPatrick O'ShaughnessyPaul BassatPeter AttiaRaoul PalRay DalioReid HoffmanRichard BransonRyan SheaSahil LavingiaScott FarquharThe Rational WalkTrevor NcubeZoë Foster Blake
Richard Dawkins · Dawkins narrates the whole of evolutionary history as a pilgrimage backward in time, meeting ancestors at each branching point. The cumulative effect is a felt sense of deep time that no abstract statement about 'billions of years' can produce. Reading this first recalibrates everything that follows.
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Stewart Brand · Brand's book is the founding document of institutional long-term thinking. It proposes a 10,000-year clock as a forcing function for civilizational patience, and along the way develops the concept of pace layers — the idea that different structures (fashion, commerce, governance, culture, nature) change at radically different speeds, and that confusing these speeds is the root of most short-termism.
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Roman Krznaric · Krznaric surveys six ways of thinking that orient people toward longer horizons — from the cathedral builders of the medieval period to Iroquois seven-generation decision-making. His concept of 'acorn brain' versus 'marshmallow brain' is a useful diagnostic for why institutions favor short-term reward even when long-term thinking is available.
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David Wallace-Wells · Wallace-Wells's inventory of worst-case climate projections is included here not as a climate book but as a case study in what happens when institutions consistently discount long-term risk. The scenarios he describes are already visible in the data; they were predictable decades ago. This is what the failure of long-term thinking looks like from inside it.
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Donella H. Meadows · Meadows wrote this before systems thinking became a popular phrase, and it remains the clearest account of why short-term interventions in complex systems so often backfire. The chapter on leverage points is the conceptual core of what long-term thinking actually requires from decision-makers.
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William MacAskill · MacAskill's longtermist argument, grounded in effective altruism, is the most rigorous philosophical case for prioritizing future people. His core claim — that if the future contains vast numbers of people, influencing its trajectory matters more than almost anything we might do for the present — is informed by Derek Parfit's work on personal identity and is the most demanding version of the long-term thinking argument.
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Lowell Miller · 1999 · Miller on buying rising-dividend businesses and holding them.
Daniel Peris · 2011 · Peris argues dividends, not multiple expansion, drive real returns.
Christopher Mayer
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