Compounding and Long-Term Holding

Buy a few outstanding growth companies, research them by scuttlebutt, and hold.

US returns since 1802 show stocks beat bonds and cash over every long period.

Stock, bond and bill returns for sixteen countries from 1900 to 2000.

Buffett's life to 2008, written with full access to his files and his friends.

Berkshire's shareholder letters arranged by topic: governance, valuation, mergers.

Three generations compounding a fortune through insurance stocks

What makes a business high quality and worth owning for years at a fair price.

Twenty short essays on why behaviour matters more than knowledge with money.

A fund manager of sixty years on investing, business and a long life.

Subtitled Stocks That Return 100-to-1 and How to Find Them; expanded edition 2025.

Lessons from 25 years of interviews with investors from Templeton to Munger.

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.

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.

Harari's concern — that humans may cede decision-making to opaque systems through preference rather than coercion — reframes the alignment problem as a cultural and political challenge, not only a technical one. Less rigorous than Bostrom or Russell, but more widely read, making it a useful lens for understanding public discourse.

How shared fictions such as money, nations and gods let humans cooperate at scale.

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.

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.

Six ways of thinking that help people plan for generations ahead.

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.

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.

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.

Miller on buying rising-dividend businesses and holding them.

Peris argues dividends, not multiple expansion, drive real returns.

Naval Ravikant's ideas on building wealth and being happy, gathered from his talks.