There’s Always Something to Do - Book Review

By Lorenzo Ayres

Christopher Risso-Gill (drawn from Peter Cundill's journals) Category: Investing & Capital Allocation

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There’s Always Something to Do is about a certain kind of investor, the kind who is famous inside the tent and almost invisible outside it, and Peter Cundill is the cleanest example I can think of. Value people know exactly who he is. Almost nobody else does. That’s a shame, because this book, which is really his journals turned into a narrative by his longtime friend and former fund director Christopher Risso-Gill, is one of the most candid looks I’ve read at what the daily practice of value investing actually feels like, as opposed to how it gets talked about at conferences. And the title matters. There's Always Something to Do is the entire philosophy in five words, and I want to make the case for why an operator, not just a fund manager, should take it seriously.

Cundill ran the Cundill Value Fund out of Canada and hunted globally in a very specific tradition, the deep Graham tradition, where you are not paying up for a wonderful story, you are buying a dollar of assets for 50 or 60 cents and insisting on a margin of safety you can measure. He would dig through the least glamorous corners of the world, unloved balance sheets, forgotten markets, companies trading below the value of what you could get by simply liquidating them, and he would do it patiently, for decades, with a discipline that reads almost boring on the page until you realize the boredom is the edge. What makes the book special is that because it’s built from his diaries, you get the doubt, the waiting, the physical discipline, the marathons he ran, the way he treated curiosity and health and temperament as part of the investment process rather than separate from it. It’s not a victory lap. It’s a logbook.

Let me pull out what I actually took from it, because a review that just praises a book is useless, and I’m reading these the way I read everything now, which is with a pen and one question what does this change about how I run my business?

The first idea is the title itself, and it’s more radical than it sounds. “There's always something to do” does not mean stay busy. It means that if you’re willing to look, in enough places, with a wide enough net, there is always a bargain or a lever somewhere in the world, and the reason most people can’t find it is that they only look where it’s comfortable. As an operator I feel this in my bones, because running the park is a daily exercise in refusing to accept that a constraint is permanent. Occupancy feels capped, until you look at inventory and realize the limit is the number of cabins, not demand. Cash flow feels tight, until you look at the debt and realize the problem is the amortization schedule, not the amount. Cundill's whole posture is that the answer exists and your job is to go find it, and that’s a more useful attitude for a founder than any pep talk I’ve ever heard.

The second idea is margin of safety as a design principle. Cundill didn’t buy things because they were going up, he bought them because if he was wrong, the downside was already paid for by the assets underneath. I think about this every single day in how we’re financing the cabins. We build a cabin for roughly $200,000, and there is a real, physical, sellable asset at the end of it, sitting on land, generating nightly revenue. That’s the operator's version of buying assets below their worth, and the discipline Cundill models is to never let the excitement of the growth story talk you out of asking the unglamorous question, what is this actually worth if everything goes sideways? The value investors call that liquidation value. Operators should call it sleeping at night.

The third idea, and this one is personal, is the journal. Cundill wrote things down constantly, and the book exists at all because he did. He tracked his reasoning, his mistakes, his health, his reading. I’ve become a believer that the single highest-leverage habit for anyone trying to compound anything, capital or a company, is writing down what you decided and why, so that future you can grade past you. I have my board, I have my trackers, I have this very review, and none of that is an accident. Cundill is a reminder that process isn’t bureaucracy, it’s how a temperament survives contact with a bad year.

The fourth idea is patience as a competitive weapon. Cundill would wait, sometimes for a long time, for the price to come to him, and he treated the waiting as the work rather than as dead time. I’m living a version of this right now. Our real refinance isn’t this month.t’s in 2027, after a full stabilized year of operating history, and the temptation is always to force it early. The book gives me permission to run the process now, build the relationships now, get the numbers clean now, and let the actual event arrive when the setup is right, not when I'm impatient. Deep value investors and operators building toward a milestone are playing the same game, which is the game of doing quiet, correct work in the interval before the payoff shows up.

The fifth idea is the global net, the willingness to look everywhere. Cundill didn’t care where a bargain lived, he cared whether the math worked. For me that translates directly into how I look at growth beyond the current footprint, whether that is evaluating another property or a different model entirely. The lesson is to not to fall in love with one geography or one format. Keep the aperture wide and let the numbers, and the margin of safety, decide.

Who should read this? Any operator who is tired of motivational content and wants to see what disciplined, unglamorous, long-horizon thinking actually looks like on a random Tuesday. Any investor who talks about margin of safety but has never watched someone live it for 30 years. And honestly, anybody who is building toward a payoff that is a year or two out and needs a model for how to behave in the meantime. It’s not a loud book, and the loud stuff rarely compounds.

If I had to reduce There’s Always Something to Do to one sentence for our team, it would be this: there’s always a lever if you’re willing to look in the uncomfortable places, and the discipline to wait, write it down, and insist on a margin of safety is not caution, it is how you win slowly enough to keep it.

About Lorenzo Ayres

Lorenzo Ayres is a business builder, dealmaker, and owner of America's Outdoor Adventure Park in Jay, Oklahoma. Here he reviews books on investing, deal structure, and business strategy.

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