Mistaking the Garden for the Treasure

In the world of archetypes, there is a great distinction between the garden and the treasure. The garden is where we spend our time planting seeds and growing things. It represents the many projects we embark on through our lives. Some projects grow into profitable ventures, others don't. Mostly, they keep us occupied and with a reasonable income, but nothing more.

The treasure, on the other hand, represents our savings. We do not spend much time looking at it. It's invested in gold, real estate or financial assets, depending on what part of the business cycle we are in. A balanced portfolio will have a bit of everything with a weighting towards whatever is most likely to happen over the coming decade or so. Above all, it's invested in safe and sound things.

Compared to our garden, treasures are boring. It is therefore easy to give treasures less value than they have. A young man with an exciting project is easily tempted into staking his inherited treasure on the success of his project. He puts his treasure at way too much risk compared to the odds for a positive outcome. More often than not, such ventures fail, and whatever was invested is lost.

Another pitfall of the garden is that we may grow so fond of it that we neglect our treasures. Happy to spend our days in our garden, our treasures are slowly eroded by taxation and other expenses. We fail to protect it. We fail to see that changes in our lives have to correspond to changes to our investments. There has to be the occasional re-balancing for the treasure to grow.

By user:ozgurmulazimoglu - https://www.flickr.com/photos/mulazimoglu/with/5154611142/, CC BY 3.0, Link