Eric Markowitz

Sharing my favorite quotes from @EricMarkowitz's recent speech at VALUEx BRK 2026 on endurance and stewardship and the story of Hoshi Ryokan: Outlier of endurance boils down to stewardship. Stewardship is a philosophy of care. It removes the ego from every aspect of life with a total focus on simply serving those around us. It is a belief, a duty, and a moral ambition and obligation to cultivate and maintain the business's eternal health, which requires patience, restraint, and the utmost respect for the product/service. In 718 AD, a Buddhist monk named Taicho Daishi discovered a hot spring, but he did not claim it for himself, commercialize it, or profit from it. He adopted a young man and named him Zengoro Hoshi to help build a small inn around the flowing water. He asked for a promise that the spring would be protected for all future generations, so it could be preserved for weary and sick travelers seeking healing. Since then, 47 generations across 13 centuries, this oldest independently run hot spring hotel welcomes all customers, from "monks to emperors", from the poorest to the richest. It exists to serve everyone, not to maximize its shareholder value or to optimize for the highest-paying customer. Unsurprisingly, a business will go through struggles. Learn from water. Water adapts and finds a way. While one might be an owner of a business, stewardship is to be a caretaker, ensuring the business survives and thrives for the next generation, and a gardener, cultivating the property over time through good seasons and bad. When you treat a business not as something to be "built" or "grown," but instead approach it with care, with duty, and with love, you create the conditions for something that can outlast you. A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit. A steward's goal is to hand the business to the next generation in a better condition than when she inherited it. Ownership is temporary. Everything is temporary within our hands. You own nothing. You are simply passing it down. That is stewardship, a daily act of selfless love. Find your hot spring. Find the thing you believe is worth passing on. Take care of it. And who knows, maybe one day, long after we are all gone, your business will celebrate its 1,308th birthday, too.