The Rent Already Paid

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, two brush makers took the same stall in the same distant market, and the one who threw away four pounds prospered.

Two brush makers in one lane, the same beech stocks and the same hog bristle.
Both took a stall in the county town, nine miles off, the rent paid a year ahead.
Both found by Christmas it returned less than the two days a week it cost them.
One gave it up in January and forfeited every penny he had paid.
One kept it two years more, on account of what he had already put in.
Why was the man who wasted four pounds the richer of the two?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two brush makers in the town I've never named, their workshops four doors apart. Beech stocks bored in rows, hog bristle sorted by length along the bench, the knots drawn into the holes with a loop of wire and set in pitch. Both made a sound brush.

Three springs before, both had heard the same news. The covered market in the county town, nine miles off, had places vacant at four pounds the year, paid in advance, on a three-year agreement. Both took one, and it was no foolish thing to do. That town had five times the households and no brush maker worth the name.

What the stall wanted was two days a week. One to mind it, the better part of another in the cart there and back, and the boy's wage besides. By the first Christmas both men had the same figures before them. A hundred days of the year, and close to five pounds clear once rent and cart and boy were paid. Five pounds is not nothing. It was also less than a hundred days at home had been worth the year before.

In January the first brush maker sat down with the book and asked a new question. Not whether the stall was paying, which he knew, but this: if a man came to the door tomorrow offering him a place in the county market at four pounds the year and two days a week, knowing what he now knew of it, would he take it? He would not have thought about it for ten minutes. So he gave notice, lost the four pounds paid for the year he was abandoning, and was told on the lane that he had thrown good money away.

He had the two days. He spent them on the two inns, the mills along the river and the workhouse, all within four miles of his own door. Dull customers who wanted plain scrubbing brushes and brooms a dozen at a time, and wanted them again when they wore out. By the third year that work was worth thirty pounds, and he never harnessed a horse for it.

The second brush maker saw the same figures and reasoned differently, and reasoned like a careful man. There was four pounds paid, a cart bought partly for the stall, a boy trained up a year, and his name becoming known in a town of five thousand. To walk away was to lose the lot. So he kept the stall its full three years, because in his mind the three years were already bought and must be used. It returned him five pounds a year, and every year the five pounds proved him right to stay. What it also did, without once appearing in the book, was spend his Tuesday and half his Wednesday. He never called on the mills. He had not the day to do it in.

Be fair to him. A man who abandons what he has paid for does not usually have a workshop at all.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

What you have already spent is gone whichever way you now decide, which makes it the one fact in the room with no right to a vote. The only question any decision can answer is what to do with the next shilling and the next Tuesday. They are the only things still for sale.

Knowing the rule does not help much, so it is worth seeing why it is hard to keep. Stopping and being wrong feel like the same act. While the stall runs, the decision to take it is still an open question with a hopeful answer. Give it up and the question closes against you. So a man goes on paying partly in order not to finish a sentence about himself.

There is a second mechanism, and this archive has recommended using it on other people. A customer holding a card with two marks on it will finish the card, because a thing begun exerts a pull that a thing not begun does not. The same lever works on you, and against you. On a customer it pulls him towards something he wanted anyway. On you it pulls you towards whatever you happened to start.

Then there is the cost that never reaches the ledger. A losing line does not merely lose money. It occupies hours, and those are the only hours in which you might have gone looking for something better. The first brush maker did not find the mills because he was cleverer. He found them because he had a free Tuesday.

Two cautions. First, this is no licence to abandon things early, and most good work has a flat stretch at the start that looks exactly like failure while you stand in it. The flat part is the price, not the verdict. So the test is not whether a thing is paying yet, but whether, knowing how it has behaved, you would begin it again this morning at this price. A thing with a known ramp can pass that honestly in a lean year. A thing that has merely disappointed you for three years cannot. Second, write your answer down with a figure beside it before you go looking for reasons, or you will adjust the test until it yields what you hoped for.

Three questions, and the second is the one that stings:

1. What are you carrying on with that you would not begin tomorrow? A product line, a weekly appointment, software paid for by the year, a customer. Name one. There is nearly always one, and you have known of it for months.
2. What is it costing in days rather than in pounds? Count the hours it truly takes, then ask whether they could be any part of your best week.
3. On what date does it stop? A decision to stop with no date against it is not a decision, it is a mood. Give it a day, tell whoever needs telling, and put it in the book.

The Answer to the Riddle

Why was the man who wasted four pounds the richer of the two? Because the four pounds was lost in either case. Nothing decided in January could unspend it. The only thing still his to spend was a hundred days a year, and he bought those back with a sum he had already parted with. His neighbour spent the same four pounds and kept the right to say he had not wasted it.

The verse:

Four pounds laid down at Lady Day, and gone by Christmas Eve,
One man gave the stall away, one man would not leave.
The first had Tuesdays all his own and found the mills by spring,
The second kept his bargain out, and kept the one wrong thing.

Until next time. Go and name the one thing you would not start again, and write beside it the date it stops.

P.S. The dangerous ones are never the plain failures, which get stopped soon enough by the bank or the larder. The ones that run for years are those that return a little, because a little return will defend itself in argument, and five pounds clear sounds like success to a man who has not asked what the hundred days would otherwise have fetched. Look first at whatever you would call ticking over.

Also in the archive: The Habits of the Hungry Year, What the Porter Did and The Round He Would Not Widen.