“A wise prince should never remain idle in peaceful times, but by industry make such good use of the time as may serve him in adversity, so that when fortune changes she may find him prepared to resist her blows.” – Niccolo Machiavelli
It’s important to avoid resting on your laurels or becoming complacent. Things may be going well for you now, but the long experience of history teaches us that circumstances and “fortune” can change quickly. Let’s say you have a great job, family, and a nice place to live. Life is good and the future is bright. It is easy to coast along and slip into a life of leisure. But we know that circumstances can change. You must be proactive to prepare for the proverbial “rainy day.”
Fortune and Virtù
Machiavelli gave these two forces names: “fortuna,” the chaos of chance that topples the unready, and “virtù.” This is not virtue in the moral sense, but the prowess, discipline, and foresight by which a person masters circumstance. Fortune, he argued, is the arbiter of perhaps half our affairs and the rest is left to us. The entire project of preparedness is an exercise in virtù. In other words, you cannot command the river, but you can build the dykes. Every defense worth building is a small refusal to leave your fate entirely in fortune’s hands.
Build Your Defenses
Take stock of your defenses:
Financial:
- Sufficient emergency savings
- Debt being actively eliminated
- Investing for retirement and your children’s education
- Adequate insurance, e.g. health, auto, home, disability, umbrella
- An estate plan in place
- Supplemental sources of income
Personal:
- Physical and mental health maintained
- Mind kept active through learning and reading
- Skill set strengthened, with new skills added
- Relationships built, others helped, network expanded
These are just a few items, but the principle is the same: build your defenses diligently now, so that a negative turn of events finds you guarded rather than exposed.
Relating to the business world, Warren Buffett says, “The really good business manager doesn’t wake up in the morning and say, ‘This is the day that I’m going to cut costs,’ any more than he wakes up and decides to practice breathing.” In other words, the time to keep your overhead under control and prepare for downturns is before you’re forced to do so.
Machiavelli continues in “The Prince” comparing [mis]fortune to a violent river flooding the land:
Still, the fact that a river is like this doesn’t prevent us from preparing for trouble when levels are low, building banks and dykes, so that when the water rises the next time it can be contained in a single channel and the rush of the river in flood is not so uncontrolled and destructive…[Mis]fortune is the same. It shows its power where no one has taken steps to contain it, flooding into places where it finds neither banks nor dykes that can hold it back.
The river will rise, that much is certain. The only question is whether it finds banks and dykes, or open floodplain. Machiavelli’s counsel, five centuries old, is as practical as advice gets. Do the quiet work of preparation while the sun is shining, and fortune’s blows will find you ready.
Read more from Niccolo Machiavelli in “The Prince.“
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