I’m impatient. I’m anxious. I want things to change quick, get to the results quicker.
I want to do things as fast as possible, as fast as I can.
I hate waiting for something, someone, whatever.
I’m the exact opposite of a patient person.
Yet, I learned to exhibit patience, so much patience, that no one can believe that it was me.
How?
Like all things, investing was difficult in the beginning. There was a lot of waiting.
I could not know whether my decisions were right or wrong until a good amount of time had passed, and even then it was merely a guess and not certainty.
The feedback loop in investing is long, sometimes infinitely long(you never get to know).
I couldn’t wait at all. It was super hard.
Trading on the other hand, was immediate feedback. I could see which trades went right and why some went wrong.
The golden tenets of a successful investor is being patient and exhibiting patience - this leads to
lesser transactions (low portfolio turnover)
holding the winners longer
increase the probability of holding on to what might be a multi-bagger
I could safely say that if patience is not exhibited as an investor in holding onto winners, then we won’t be successful at all.
When patience is such a critical ingredient of successful investing, how do I, as an inherently impatient person since birth, exhibit patience?
Enter functional patience.
(Just a fancy term by yours truly)
I can exhibit patience by doing the opposite of what the patient people do - so that negative and negative multiply to give a positive.
Clarifying,
Patient people exhibit patience by consciously voluntarily being patient.
For example, to draw the letter O, they consciously focus on drawing the letter O.
What I do is, draw the space around O by focusing on the space that is NOT O.
The final result is the same - a picture of O.
But how each was arrived at was in different ways.
I exhibit patience in investing, by not focusing on it.
Or rather, I exhibit impatience on things that are not part of the investing process.
I channel my impatience towards learning about investing through books, interviews, coding portfolio analytics, getting healthier, going out with friends.
The result is, I’m busy exhibiting impatience, time and thoughts on things that are not “investing”, so that “investing” receives my lack of impatience, lack of time, lack of thoughts (thereby receives patience).
( - ) x ( - ) = ( + )
By simply avoiding/ignoring/not focusing on the things I want to be patient on, and keeping myself busy by being impatient on the things that I can afford to be impatient on, I’m in effect exhibiting functional patience.
- Sibi
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