The Gentleman's Code: To The Long Game

My boys,

The best offer I ever walked away from was made on the hood of a car in a parking lot, and it took about nine minutes.

A man I respected had already written the numbers out. Twelve locations in three years. His money, a bigger roaster, cheaper beans, and his name somewhere on the paperwork.

He was not a crook. That part always gets left out of stories like this one. He was a good man with a fast plan and a pen.

I asked for a week. He gave me an hour.

After he drove off I stood there and ran the math again on my phone, and the math was never the problem. The math was excellent.

It was one line in the middle of it. The beans.

Saying yes meant walking away from three farms whose families I had spent six years learning the names of.

Nine minutes to agree. Six years to build the thing I would have been agreeing to give away.

I said no in that parking lot, and I drove home feeling less like a man of principle and more like a man who had just been afraid.

Now here is where these stories usually start lying to you.

He built it.

Not badly. Not on sand. He opened his fourth location the year I was still arguing with a landlord about the back door of my first.

I drove past it. More than once. I would like to tell you I had peace about it, and I did not.

The fourth year was the worst. That is the year I learned what envy actually is.

Envy is just impatience wearing somebody else's clothes.

It never tells you that you chose wrong. It is smarter than that. It only asks, over and over, why it is taking so long.

And I want you to understand something, because it is the most honest thing I can hand you about any of this.

He is still doing well today. Twenty years on. He did not collapse in the last chapter so that your father could turn out to be right.

Most men will not tell you that part. They need the other road to end badly in order to justify their own.

The long game is not a slower road to the same place.

It is a different place. And you have to want that place, specifically, or the waiting will eat you alive.

Because if what you wanted was the four locations, you should have taken the four locations.

There was a hillside in the highlands, years later, where I finally understood what I had actually chosen.

An old farmer walked me through rows of seedlings no higher than my knee. He told me they would not give a single cherry for four years.

He was seventy-one.

I asked him, badly, through a translator, whether he expected to still be here for it.

He laughed at me. It was not a bitter laugh. He pointed back up the hill at the old trees we had just walked down through, heavy with fruit, and told me his father planted those.

Then he turned around and went back to the seedlings.

I have thought about that man more than almost anyone I have ever done business with.

He was not being noble. He was simply doing the arithmetic correctly.

The older I become, the more I have come to believe God rarely finishes anything inside the span of one man.

He is not slow. He is working on a larger sheet of paper than the one we are holding.

We keep asking Him to hurry because we can only see our own square of it.

So here is how you will know which game you are actually playing.

Ask yourself what you would still be doing if you knew for certain that no one would ever find out it worked.

Whatever survives that question is the long game. Everything else is a plan for applause.

And I will tell you plainly what the long road actually bought me, because it was not money.

It bought a life with no season in it that I have to hide from you.

I never once had to hire a man I would have to lie to. I never had to explain a shortcut to your mother.

I slept. For thirty years, whatever else was going wrong, I slept.

That is not a small purchase. I did not know I was buying it at the time.

Do not mistake any of this for passivity. Slow is not the same as still.

The long game is played every single morning, in the dark, on the days it is producing absolutely nothing you can show anyone.

It teaches patience.

Then humility.

Then, eventually, gratitude, because you finally see how little of it was ever your own doing.

There is one more thing, and you are holding it.

I do not know how old you will be when you read these pages. I do not know what will already have happened to you by then.

That is rather the point. I am not writing to the boys at my table tonight. I am writing to the men sitting across from you one day.

Some of what is planted here I will not be in the room for.

Plant anyway.

I love you.

— Baba

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Question: What are you building right now that you would still build if you knew for certain that no one would ever find out it worked?

Moral: The long game is not a slower road to the same place — it is a different place, and a gentleman plants what he may never sit under, trusting God to keep a longer calendar than his own.

Disclaimer: This story reflects real experiences and philosophies behind Backyard Brew. It is shared to inspire perspective and intention.

Author: R. Solace