Warren Buffet is one of the greatest investment minds of our time. I’m not going to lie to you and say that I understand the ins and outs of his investment philosophy, how he makes his decisions and why it all works (my friend Miguel Barbosa might be able to help you out with that), but what I will tell you is that it’s based on two universal tenants of good entrepreneurship.

• Creating fundamentally sound businesses.
• Surviving for long enough for them to work.

Mr. Buffet is a value investor, he likes to identify companies that will be around for a long time and hold onto them for as long as he can. He does this knowing that as long as the businesses remain in business, in the long term, they will grow in value. It’s a bet he has taken thousands of times, and more often than not — he’s right.

What does this have to do with you? Well, I’ll let you in on a little secret.

99% of all good entrepreneurship advice teaches you how to survive until tomorrow.

That is because 99% of all successful business is surviving until tomorrow. Your project, whatever it is, can be broken down into a series of small victories and small defeats. To make it, what you need to do is accumulate enough victories. The trick is that you have to do this before the defeats do you in.

The rhetoric that people like myself throw at you is designed to speed up those victories and slow down the defeats.

Could it be that simple?

Most things are but let’s not forget part one of Mr. Buffet’s philosophy, “identifying fundamentally sound businesses.”

You can survive for quite a long time doing something that is incredibly stupid. That doesn’t mean that you are going to be successful. Fundamentally sound businesses all fufill two basic criteria:

1. The longer they’re running the more valuable they become to someone.

2. The longer they’re running the cheaper or more efficient they become to run.

Whether we are talking about a restaurant or a website, the good ones become easier to manage over time. It takes fewer resources to get the same results and the results become more predictable. Of course, you’ll still need to invest in growth but if you’re finding that two years in you’re fighting just as hard simply to maintain your numbers month after month, something is seriously wrong with your model.

There are a lot of things you can focus on early in your project’s life cycle. Most of it is useless in the long term, not because it won’t have an effect but because it is not directly linked to your next day survival. When you’re trying to develop your project roadmap remember that no matter how clever your promotions or marketing is, sometimes the most important thing is how you’re going to make the next payroll because if you can do that for long enough, accumulate enough little victories the rest of it will fall inline.

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If you enjoyed that why not find a job or read our guide to working in the 21st century. You can also join our Kiva team or hire me for your project.