Forget What’s Trending: Build a Business That Lasts Decades
Nov 11, 2025
Ever wonder why some businesses flourish for decades while others fizzle out faster than a New Year's resolution? In our blink-and-you'll-miss-it world, it's easy to get caught up in the latest trends and fleeting fads. But what if there was a secret weapon to building enduring success, a way to peer into the future and predict longevity?
Enter the Lindy Effect.
Half of all new companies fail within five years, and 80% don't make it past the first two decades. If you want to build a legacy—a business, an investment, or a career that truly lasts—you need to stop asking, “What is hot right now?” and start asking the only question that matters: “What will still be essential 20 years from now?”.The secret to this radical, long-term thinking is a concept called The Lindy Effect. And it is the single most powerful framework for building true, enduring value.
What is The Lindy Effect, and Why Does Your Business Need It?
The Lindy Effect, popularized by author and statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb, is a simple, non-intuitive idea that applies to non-perishable things—ideas, technologies, books, and, yes, business models:
The future life expectancy of a non-perishable item is proportional to its current age. For every period it has already survived, it is likely to survive for another equivalent period.
Think about it:
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If a classic novel has been in print for 100 years, you can statistically expect it to be in print for another 100 years.
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If a business has been successfully operating for 50 years, it has a much higher statistical chance of surviving the next 50 years than a six-month-old startup.
Non-perishable things don't age like a person; they age in reverse. Every year a company survives is not a step toward death, but a testament to its robustness and antifragility—its ability to not just withstand, but gain from disorder, stress, and volatility.
The Lindy Effect is a silent filter, eliminating the fragile, the faddish, and the fleeting, leaving you with the truly durable.
3 Lindy-Tested Principles for Building an Enduring Business
How do you apply this ancient wisdom to your modern enterprise? It requires a shift from chasing maximum short-term growth to optimizing for maximum long-term survival.
1. Build on Timeless Human Needs, Not Fleeting Technologies
Disruptive technology is a tool, not a foundation. Technology changes yearly, but fundamental human psychology—our needs, desires, and fears—changes glacially, if at all.
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Non-Lindy Focus (Fragile): Chasing the latest social media algorithm, building a business solely around a single, proprietary app, or creating a product whose value proposition relies entirely on a new, unproven gadget. This maybe a good strategy for a start-up business but will not last over the decades.
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Lindy Focus (Robust): Build your business on things humans will always want:
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Communication: (e.g., the postal service has outlasted countless technologies; the desire to connect remains).
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Security: (e.g., insurance and banking are centuries old).
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Health and Wellness: (e.g., simple, real food and exercise).
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Learning: (e.g., mentorship, storytelling, and apprenticeship).
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The Lindy Rule: Your core product or service should be built around a problem that existed 100 years ago and will almost certainly exist 100 years from now. If your solution vanished tomorrow, would a recognizable replacement have to be invented? If the answer is yes, you're on solid ground.
2. Prioritize Resilience Over Efficiency
In the short term, being hyper-efficient—running lean, outsourcing everything, and optimizing for the cheapest option—can boost profits. But it makes you fragile. When a Black Swan event hits (a pandemic, a supply chain collapse, a sudden economic downturn), your finely tuned machine shatters.
Lindy-compatible businesses build in redundancy and slack, which allows them to absorb shocks and emerge stronger.
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Non-Lindy Focus (Fragile): A just-in-time supply chain with zero inventory and a single global supplier chosen purely on cost. High debt and a razor-thin cash reserve.
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Lindy Focus (Robust):
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Maintain Reserves: Hold a large cash cushion (an "antifragile buffer") that allows you to weather years of drought or invest when competitors are panic-selling.
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Redundant Systems: Have multiple suppliers, or even pay a premium for a local supplier, to prevent a single point of failure.
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Decentralized Knowledge: Don't let all critical knowledge reside in one star employee. Create systems that make your business operational even if key people depart.
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The Lindy Rule: Don't ask, "How can I make this cheaper?" Ask, "How can I make this survive the worst possible scenario?"
3. Embrace Simple, Compounding Business Models
Complex business models—the ones that need 100 slides to explain, rely on endless debt refinancing, or require constant, breakneck technological innovation just to stay relevant—are inherently fragile. They have too many moving parts that can break.
The businesses that stand the test of time often have simple, compounding models:
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The Barbell Strategy: Keep 90% of your resources in extremely safe, proven, Lindy-compliant activities (e.g., selling a core, reliable product to a loyal customer base) and dedicate 10% to highly experimental, small-scale risks (e.g., testing a wild new market or technology).
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Deep Customer Trust: Companies like Hermès, Coca-Cola, and John Deere don't sell products; they sell trust and reputation that took a century to build. This is a Lindy moat—something that cannot be copied overnight.
The Lindy Rule: The simpler the core value exchange, the more durable the business. Can you explain your entire business model in one sentence to a 10-year-old? If so, you’re on the right track.
In the end, The Lindy Effect is a powerful lens that reminds us of a fundamental truth: time is the ultimate filter.
When you look at companies that have been around for a century, they didn't survive by being the fastest, the shiniest, or the trendiest. They survived by being the most adaptable, the most trustworthy, and the most robust. They built a foundation based on enduring principles and human needs, not on the shifting sands of technology.
Forget the hype cycle. The most valuable investment you can make—in your business, your career, or your portfolio—is in what has already proven its ability to last.
The future doesn't belong to those who build quick, fragile empires, but to those who play the infinite game—the ones who value survival and legacy over a spectacular, short-lived blaze of glory.
If you are ready to pivot from chasing fleeting revenue to building a legacy of enduring value, your thinking needs to make the leap.
Are you tired of constantly reacting to market volatility and chasing the next fleeting trend? Are you ready to discard the fragile strategies of short-term growth for the robust, time-tested principles of enduring success?
It’s time to stop building your business for today's headlines and start architecting it for the next generation.
Ready to build a business so robust it defies volatility and stands the test of time?
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