Investing in the foundation

[jlengstorf]

I had a great conversation with @shinytoyrobots about the importance of spending the time, effort, and money up front to get something solid in place — whether that's the underlying foundation of a software product; the reasoning and planning behind major decisions; or just spending the money on truly high-quality cookware — and he reminded me of this quote from Terry Pratchett’s Men at Arms:

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

I want to use this as the seed for a post on investing in yourself and your projects in a way that will make the penny-saved-is-a-penny-earned types flip their shit.