Patience and the Long Horizon
Sustainable wealth is built slowly; the wisdom traditions warn against the schemes that promise to skip the patient years.
Proverbs cautions that 'wealth gained hastily will dwindle, but whoever gathers little by little will increase it' (13:11), and the same patience pervades the Taoist trust in slow natural process and the agricultural rhythms of every ancient culture. The teaching is that real value compounds over time and that the desire to bypass the patient years is the very impulse that fraudsters and gamblers exploit. Steady accumulation also builds the character and competence that allow one to hold wealth once gained. Haste, by contrast, tends to destroy what it grasps. This is one of the clearest convergences between ancient wisdom and modern finance: the mathematics of compound interest rewards time in the market and punishes the impatient search for shortcuts.
Wealth gained hastily will dwindle, but whoever gathers little by little will increase it.
The mathematics of compound interest, which Einstein is popularly said to have called the eighth wonder of the world, gives quantitative force to the ancient preference for gathering little by little over the fragile gains of haste.
Hebrew Bible