Patience

Of all virtues, patience is one of the better ones.

I have been taught patience by brute force, moving to the South in 2010 and being stuck behind people Sunday driving on a Tuesday. 15 years ago, I would be stuck behind someone going 15 in a 45 (not an exaggeration in the slightest) and get absolutely homicidal. Murderous rage. These days, I just roll with it. You see, it’s all about ego deflation. Am I really that important? Is what I am doing that important, that taking an extra minute to get to my destination is going to somehow inconvenience me? Remember Rule 62: don’t take yourself too damn seriously.

I am one of the most patient people I know. How did I achieve this enlightened state? With the knowledge that if you leave something the fuck alone for long enough, it usually works out. Things usually work out in the end. If it hasn’t worked out, it’s not the end! Oftentimes, I am in a situation where I am waiting for a contract to be signed or an invoice to be paid. When I first started the newsletter in 2008, I was up people’s ass if I didn’t get paid in a month. Now I will wait at least three months, and by that time the invoice is so overdue that it is embarrassing, and I usually get paid promptly at that point. I have a subscriber who told me in 2008 that he was going to subscribe. He finally subscribed last year…16 years later. Was getting up his ass going to make it happen any faster? Probably not. People will do the right thing after exhausting all other possibilities.

Patience is a virtue in investing, obviously. Look at Buffett and Munger, who would stick with a position for decades. If you are one of these index fund weenies, you know what patience is all about. As they say, the money isn’t made in the buying and selling, the money is made in the waiting. Given enough time, a loser often turns into a winner. I bought a Japanese bank stock in 2007 which promptly took a dirtnap, and instead of selling it, I waited. I waited 18 years, and finally sold it at a profit, for about a 1% CAGR. Not too smart to tie up capital for 18 years, but the principle applies: the passage of time usually solves all problems.

All problems. Let’s say you have a disagreement with someone and you are pissed at each other and you aren’t talking. What is the best thing to do in this situation? Nothing! And wait. To pick up the phone to resolve the problem must pass a three-pronged test:

1. Does something need to be said?

2. Does something need to be said by me?

3. Does something need to be said by me right now?

Very rarely are all three conditions satisfied. So you say nothing, and time passes, and time passes, and you bump into the guy at a party or something like that, and by that time, enough time has passed, you are no longer angry at each other, and you can have a conversation about it. Don’t force reconciliation. It will happen when it happens, and not a moment sooner. Yes, the waiting is painful. Your efforts to stop the pain and force a solution will probably be counterproductive.

It is true in romantic relationships, too. Everyone is in a big hurry to fuck. Might I suggest to postpone that activity to a later date. That is a shocking level of intimacy (in the Sartre sense) for two people who practically just met. You’re putting the cart before the horse. I know some people here read my short story “200 Hours” in Night Moves, about a young couple who commits to spending 200 hours together before they have sex. It is one of the best stories in the collection. I submitted it to a bunch of journals, and naturally, it got rejected by all of them, because of the conservative undertones. It is the only story in the collection that has a happy ending. I actually think it would make a great rom-com.

As I said before, I used to be not so good at waiting. In December of 2003 at Lehman Brothers, the head of derivatives told me that he was going to put me in charge of the ETF desk. It didn’t happen until June of 2004. Longest six months of my life. I wanted it with every cell in my body, and I was put in a position where I felt like I should remind the guy every so often, but I didn’t want to make a nuisance of myself. So I would tug on his ear about once a month. Eventually, it happened. I could have saved myself a lot of heartache if I just had some patience. Instead, I was focused on the thing in the future, instead of the thing right in front of me. Six months of my life, miserable. 1/160^th of my life, miserable. Sometimes, you are excited about a thing and you can’t focus on anything but that thing. I get it. It’s going to be okay. Remember, everything works out in the end, and if it hasn’t worked out, it’s not the end.

Sometimes, you are going through hell, and you can’t wait for it to come to an end. Like a divorce, or something like that. You know what they say: if you’re going through hell, keep going. One day at a time, one hour at a time, one minute at a time. Whatever you’re going through right now isn’t going to last forever! The way you are feeling right now—you won’t be feeling this way 3 months, 6 months, a year from now. I’ve had some dark times in my life, and when I’m going through them, I often forget that it won’t last forever. It sure seems like forever. Pain has a way of stretching out time. I try not to perseverate on things I have no control over. Again: things usually work out in the end, and the thing that you’re worried about probably isn’t going to happen. But the thing is: if you don’t have a set of spiritual tools, you might be led to believe that you are actually doomed. The story where someone is worried about a bad thing happening and the bad thing actually happens and they are ruined—I haven’t heard that story yet. That’s not to say that bad things don’t happen, they do, but they happen randomly, so it is pointless to worry about it. Easy enough to say, very hard to do.

You might confuse this with passivity, and there is indeed a fine line between patience and passivity. I can tell you that a few decades’ experience with being up people’s ass all the time has shown me that this is a failed strategy. I have had one professional relationship where I was patient to the point of passive, and at some point, the cost of waiting was too great, and I ended the relationship. I probably waited too long—I should have done it sooner. And I will also point out that all “great” people are super impatient. You think Elon Musk is waiting three months for you to get your shit together? Bezos? Impatience can also be a virtue, and telling people to hurry the fuck up without making enemies of them is definitely an underrated skill. Also: people generally don’t know when they are fucking up. You have to tell them. You can’t wait for them to figure it out on their own. Doing it tactfully is an underrated skill. I have many talents, but managing people is not one of them. There should be a book called GETTING PEOPLE TO DO WHAT YOU WANT THEM TO DO. I would read that book, though there are probably a million books like it. At Jared Dillian Money, I am the content creator and my partner is the guy who rides herd on people to get stuff done. Seems like a good division of labor. As the first lieutenant on the Coast Guard cutter ACTIVE, I was completely incompetent at managing a division of 24 petty officers and deck seamen, no matter how many leadership classes I took. You are faced with a choice: you can be up people’s ass all the time, or you can trust them to do their job and do it well.

Patience, I suppose, it a luxury of traders and writers and fuzzy-faced professors and dilettantes. In the real world, you have to get shit done. I’ll say this: if you find yourself yelling, you’re doing it wrong.

P.S. Please check out my latest mix, Kiss Me, on SoundCloud. It rocks. If you don’t do it, I’ll wait—you will go to that page eventually.