Preparedness takes time: Why resilience is built over decades

Before 24th February 2022, I was often laughed at for serving as an active reserve officer in the Swiss Armed Forces, my “power anxiety”, my “oversized solar installation” and my apparent stupidity in spending extra money on building technology.

As an adolescent, I wasn’t any better. I have laughed at my mum myself, when she still stocked up on canned foods in the late 1990s, telling her that the war was over.

There is nothing to laugh about here. Good stuff takes time. No matter if you are preparing for times of crisis, revolutionizing energy, or building a company, you will need to think long-term.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb used the term “invest in preparedness, not in prediction” in his famous book, The Black Swan. And preparedness takes many years to reach a level that defends you against all — or at least most — odds.

Let’s look at some examples.

Military Defense

I was summoned to national service in the Swiss Armed Forces when I was 19 years old. The year was 2001, and Europe was peaceful. Talking about the enemy coming from the East was more of a joke than a tactical principle at that time.

Then came 9/11. I remember how we learned about the attacks in Washington and New York during a break in an army exercise. For a short period, we thought all hell would break loose and we would soon become the new war-time generation.

However, despite all the havoc breaking loose in Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11, Europe remained largely peaceful.

Countries happily reduced their defense budgets and capabilities, focusing more on countering terrorism than on defending a military adversary.

In the meantime, I became an active reserve officer in 2006. I went on to command a company, and later take over staff functions in the General Staff.

Lots of people asked me if it was worth spending all that time in the military.

“There won’t be any conventional wars in the future.”

“Why don’t we spend the money on education rather than for some old-school guys playing war.”

Then came COVID-19. Switzerland mobilized 8’000 troops to assist the health system. I was mobilized for 8 weeks — at a time I had to get a young company through a major crisis, and with three kids in homeschooling.

After the lockdowns, many people still didn’t think an army capable of defending a military adversary was necessary. Hey, the new adversary is a virus. How do you want to combat a virus with tanks and fighter jets?

Then came February 24th, 2022. War came back to Europe. Within weeks, defense budgets in several European countries were increased significantly. My critical friends suddenly started asking me about tank tactics, our defense capabilities, and how I would judge the situation and its development.

Why could I answer these questions? Because I had accumulated over 15 years of experience as an active reserve officer of the Swiss Armed Forces. There wasn’t a single year in those 15+ years I didn’t spend time in the military, exercising and training.

Well-trained soldiers and officers are the core of any army. You can’t create them just in time when a threat appears at your front door. Furthermore, some functions need experience: If nobody would have served during the peaceful years from 1990–2021, there wouldn’t be any senior officers today. Just cadets.

The same is true for military equipment. In times of crisis and war, things like tanks and fighter jets are in high demand and can’t be procured just in time. Investments into defense capability need to be continuous, also in peaceful times when they might seem unnecessary. Even when some people don’t understand it.

Energy Transition

We all know that we will need to rethink our energy sources and consumption. Even if you’re not a member of the Green Party, climate change becomes visible wherever you look.

In its “The Limits to Growth” paper of 1972, the Club of Rome issued its first warning about sustainability and environmental limits. That was 53 years ago. In its “The First Global Revolution” paper of 1991, the Club of Rome declared climate change as a global issue. That was 34 years ago.

And where are we now? We have made some progress on the energy transition, but by far not as much as we need if we want to avoid a climate collapse.

The energy transition takes time. Speaking for myself, it took me 10 years to retrofit my house with solar panels, a house battery, and a rainwater tank. Those retrofit projects lifted my house to 70–80% self-sufficiency over the year. Because many people asked me how I did it, I wrote up my experience in an eBook.

70–80% self-sufficiency for a residential building is great. But it’s by far not enough to push society as a whole towards clean energy. There is still a lot to do for the years to come, and it will be another few decades of blood, sweat, and tears before we will see success.

Building A Company

Building a company from scratch is possibly the hardest thing you can do. It takes grit and resilience to find product-market fit, grow, and eventually reach profitability.

Most businesses on this planet are small or medium-sized companies. Only a very few become very large, and of those who eventually do, most take a long time before they become large. Let’s look at some examples:

• Microsoft was founded in 1975 and reached 1B in revenue in 1990. That was the time most corporations introduced PCs for their workforces, running on MS-DOS or Windows 3.1.
• Apple was founded in 1976 and reached 1B in revenue in 1982. But we all know that they went through many ups and downs before they became a household name by launching the iPhone in 2007.
• Google was founded in 1998 and reached 1B in revenue in 2008. They became a household name once the internet started to become available to nearly everyone on the planet.
• OpenAI was founded in 2015 and is assumed to have reached 1B in revenue in 2023 or 2024. As it is still technically speaking a non-profit organization, its numbers are not as reliable as those of a listed company.

The point of the story? Even the giants of our time took longer than the typical 3-to-5-year focus of many VCs before they became successful. And because we only hear stellar success stories in our social media feeds, we tend to forget about all the small and medium-sized companies that became modestly successful after many years of hard work.

Conclusion

Get-rich-quick won’t work, never. It takes decades to build a resilient and prosperous society. And it takes blood, sweat, and tears from many people who silently pursue their work and mission.

And if you lose your long-term focus to take advantage in the short term, you’ll do the next generations much more harm in the long term than you benefit in the short term.

This article is also published on author's blog. illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.