It is both wiser and easier to collect winter stores in summer. In prosperity favours are cheap and friends are many. 'Tis well therefore to keep them for more unlucky days, for adversity costs dear and has no helpers... Low minds never have friends; in luck they will not recognise them: in misfortune they will not be recognised by them.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
Everything needed in hard times is discounted in good times and marked up brutally once the weather turns: credit, allies, skills, goodwill, health. The boom year is when the loan is offered unasked; the crisis year is when it is declined with regret. So the discipline runs against instinct: the moment things go well is the moment to stock the cellar, banking reserves while banking is easy, deepening relationships while you need nothing from them, fixing the roof in sunshine. The closing cut names the failure mode: low minds cannot run this maxim because prosperity makes them forget people, and the forgetting is mutual when the season reverses.
Practice
- Convert boom explicitly: in every good year, a fixed share of the surplus becomes reserves, and a fixed share of the ease becomes maintenance, of health, skills, and people.
- Collect commitments while they are cheap: the credit line arranged unneeded, the relationship deepened unprompted; adversity honours only papers signed in summer.
- Rehearse winter once a year on paper: if the main engine stopped tomorrow, what holds? The gaps in the answer are this summer's shopping list.
Use this when
- Use this at every peak, the best quarter, the big promotion, the boom market, precisely because peaks anaesthetise the need for it.
- Use it for institutions and families alike; both consume reserves in winters they refused to imagine during summers.
Ignore this when
- Don't hoard summer so hard that it stops being summer; stores are a share of the harvest, not the whole of it (maxim 82's juice remains for drinking).
- Don't prepare only financially; the winters that break people are usually short of allies and health before they are short of money.
A picture of it
The garment exporter's best three years ended, as booms do, without notice, on a cancelled contract and a currency swing. What happened next had been decided earlier: in the fat years he had banked a third, kept his old machine supplier close though cheaper ones courted him, and paid weavers on time when rivals stretched them. In the thin year, the supplier serviced him on credit, the weavers stayed without advances, and the bank, remembering three years of clean statements, extended what it refused his louder competitor. His neighbours called it luck holding. It was summer, correctly spent.
Adversity takes attendance. Only the names entered in prosperity are on its list of helpers.