This Quarter's Numbers Were Planted Three Years Ago

Dear Lee,

Look at this quarter's numbers and try to explain where they actually came from.

You'll get it wrong. Nearly everyone does. Recency bias means you credit whatever you did last month, when the truth is usually years older than that.

Sam Ovens has been turning up in your feed again lately, and this time it's actually landing. His point is simple. The work and the risk you take on today compound silently, invisibly, for a long time before anything shows up. By the time it does, you've forgotten what caused it.

Pay the price today so you can pay any price in the future.

Think about the last two years properly. Ten months spent writing the book, reading and writing every single day, rebuilding the whole company's positioning from scratch. Learning to build products from nothing. Sixteen-hour days, nearly breaking yourself to get that first app working, rebuilding it twice, burning through £20,000 to get there.

None of that paid off at the time. It felt like a hole you were digging yourself into.

But it's not this quarter's marketing that's earning the money right now. It's that.

You can articulate product design and development clearly because you wrote the book. You can sell app development because you actually learned to build apps. Every result showing up today was planted two years ago, and you're only harvesting it now.

Jeff Bezos said he could tell you his quarterly results three years in advance. Not because he could predict the future. Because this quarter's numbers were never really about this quarter. They were the fruit of a tree planted three years before, finally ready to pick.

That is the game. Plant the seed, walk away, and trust that something is growing that you can't see yet.

The risk you take on today, the system you build, the skill you force yourself to learn the hard way. None of it will show up on the scoreboard for months. Maybe years. That's not a flaw in the plan. That's how the plan actually works.

So here's the deal I'm making with myself today. Take the risk that won't pay off for two years, and stop expecting this quarter to explain itself.

Lee