In 2002, I was fortunate enough to ‘win’ a cell phone from a grocery store drawing. It was my first cell phone, so needless to say I was pretty excited.
The rub was, since I was still a college student and moving home for the summer, I had to go with an out-of-network plan. This meant that I had 8 (!) anytime minutes that I could use every day without exceeding my limit.
When I think back to this one example of progress, it’s hard to say which scenario is more laughable: telling someone 24 years ago that within a little more than a decade they would be able to have a phone in their pocket that could do just about anything imaginable…
Or looking back today and realizing how quickly this became ‘normal’.
Nearly every person has examples of things they use daily that would have seemed magical 20 years ago. Many of those things don’t feel remarkable anymore. They’re ‘just normal’.
The connection to investing here is simple. Long-term investing involves a belief that we will continue to have innovation that creates new things, solves problems, and makes people more productive.
That does not mean that investing is simple, as there’s a graveyard of companies in every industry that failed to adapt or innovate.
Long-term investing isn’t about knowing which company will create the next great innovation. Rather, it is a belief that people and companies will continue to create new things, solve problems, and make people more productive.
2050 is 24 years from now, and I wonder what will be normal then?