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A famous sweet shop makes every sweet in one small kitchen with one big oven. On an ordinary day that looks efficient. On the day a pipe bursts, it looks very different. Here is a simple way to ask what happens to a business when its one important place stops working.

A farmer who plants a mango tree asks three quiet questions before anything else: are the roots healthy, is it putting out new branches, and will it still be giving fruit twenty years from now? One of India’s best-known long-term investors asks the very same three questions of a business — and you can too.

Every selection committee has, at some point, dropped a batter who scored a fifty in the last match, and kept one who scored a duck. The scoreboard was not the reason either time. Selling a stock well works exactly the same way — and the reasons that actually count have almost nothing to do with the price.

A village well can serve every household for fifty years and then sit almost untouched within five. Nothing was wrong with the well. The world around it simply found another way to get water — and that is exactly how a company’s strongest advantage can disappear while the company itself changes almost nothing at all.