सूत्र Sutra · Swanīti

Trust is the only asset that gets cheaper every year you hold it.

Sutra 04

Nikhil Sharma · स्वनीति Swanīti · 29 July 2026 · 1 min read

Trust is the only asset that gets cheaper every year you hold it.

It came from comparing two partners. One I had worked with for ten years and one I had signed ten months before. The first needed a phone call. The second needed a brief, a review and a second review. Same work, same standard, a tenth of the cost. Nothing else on my books behaves like that. A hire costs the same to manage in year five as in year one. A lease goes up. Trust is the one thing that costs most at the start and almost nothing once it is built.

It rules out the fast version of everything. The acquisition instead of the partnership. The contract that tries to write down what only years can establish. The founder who changes partners every time one disappoints him and wonders why every relationship is in year one. It rules out treating silence as neutral. Trust is held by being used.

It costs you the years. There is no way to hold an asset for a decade faster than a decade. It costs attention when nothing is wrong, which is the only time attention is cheap. And it costs the discipline to not spend it. Trust gets cheaper every year you hold it and it is lost in one afternoon of using it for something it was not given for.