Investing, for all its spreadsheets and metrics, is largely an emotional game. We dress it up in the language of rationality — discounted cash flows, valuation multiples, risk-adjusted returns — but under the surface, it is a theater of human psychology. And at the center of this drama sits one virtue, unglamorous yet essential: patience.
Not the passive kind of patience, the “let’s just see what happens” vibe. This is the active, deliberate restraint that lets you wait for the right idea to appear, and then wait again for that idea to bear fruit, often through long stretches of doubt, noise, and volatility.
It is a discipline closer to Zen practice than to Wall Street hustle.
Indeed, as the Zen master Shunryu Suzuki once said, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” He might as well have been describing the ASX which, like all equity markets, offers only a handful of truly compelling prospects at any one time.
Most investors are uneasy with the stillness that comes from having nothing to act on, especially when spare cash is sitting in the account, quietly burning a hole in the pocket. But trying to force an idea into existence rarely leads anywhere good.
The first challenge, then, is to cultivate the patience to wait. To truly wait. Good investment ideas are rare. Exceptional ones are rarer still. Over a full career, you will encounter only a handful, and no amount of willpower can summon them into existence.
The real skill is in recognising their potential when they appear, often unexpectedly and without fanfare. Then comes the harder part: giving your process the space to unfold, allowing investigation and reflection to take their natural course. Not rushing, not forcing, but approaching it with a quiet detachment that lets clarity emerge in its own time.
The Stoics understood this. Seneca wrote, “How poor are they that have not patience! What wound did ever heal but by degrees?” Markets wound you in strange ways, not always through losses, but through the slow grind of waiting — the opportunity costs, the doubts, the headlines that test your resolve. The discipline is to endure this without flinching, to resist turning discomfort into unnecessary action.
Because that is the second layer of patience. After you have pushed the buy button, the real waiting begins.
Markets do not move on your timeline. You can be directionally right and still look like an idiot for years. The thesis unfolds in fits and starts, with detours and reversals. Prices swing. Narratives shift. Your own conviction wavers.
This is where many investors stumble — not because they were wrong, but because they could not hold on long enough to be right.
Again, the Zen masters nail it, “Sit quietly, doing nothing; spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.”
Not all progress is visible, and not all outcomes can be forced. In investing, as in life, some things take the time they take. The task is not to pull at the grass, but to make sure you have planted in the right field.
Of course, patience is not an excuse for passivity. It is not stubbornness in disguise. You reassess the facts. You update your view. But you resist the compulsion to act just to soothe your own anxiety. In this way, patience becomes a kind of inner discipline, a refusal to let emotion dictate your strategy.
We tend to think of great investors as people of action, bold and decisive. But often their greatness lies in what they do not do: the deals they pass on, the trades they avoid, the positions they hold through storms of doubt.
Charlie Munger put it well: “The big money is not in the buying or the selling, but in the waiting.” And the waiting can be excruciating.
But you need to make your peace with it.
Approach investing less as a race to the next win and more as a practice, a long apprenticeship in judgment, process, and self-mastery. Zen and Stoicism meet here. Both invite us to lower the temperature of our craving, to stay present, and to act only when the time is right.
Investing is full of noise, urgency, and temptation. The task is to resist it. The real art lies in moving with intention, not speed, and in focusing less on conquering the market and more on mastering yourself.
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