Patience is the investor's best friend, and even the patience of gorillas surpasses that of humans.

This article is a compilation from Red and Green.

Being patient in the face of the changes and eternal aspects of the capital market requires investors to understand the reasons and sources of these changes and constants, avoiding sticking to conventions. It's not about following changes or going against the historical trend out of habit, but truly calming down, enduring, understanding everything that changes and remains unchanged, and thus elevating to a suitable investment philosophy.

Professor Kelly McGonigal from Stanford University conducted a fascinating experiment in his book "The Willpower Instinct" - 19 chimpanzees against 40 humans. In essence, 19 selected chimpanzees were pitted against 40 students from Harvard University and Leipzig University. The challenge was: each participant had the choice to immediately eat two portions of their favorite food or wait for two minutes to eat six portions of their favorite food. The result was that 72% of the chimpanzees chose to wait, while only 19% of the humans were willing to wait. The conclusion was that humans are even less patient than chimpanzees.

We are not inclined to delve into why the results of the experiment turned out this way. For individual experiments, further exploration is needed on the experimental methods, specific environments, and the participants themselves, and the results may not be universally applicable.

However, similar phenomena have indeed raised a question that is worth our continuous deep thinking - patience has become increasingly scarce in the world of investments.

I. "Because No One Wants to Get Rich Slowly"

I can't recall where I read it, someone asked Buffett: "Your investment system is so simple, why don't others do the same as you?" Buffett replied: "Because no one wants to get rich slowly." In one sentence, it sums up almost all the problems we face in this era. As human society developed into an industrialized society, the significant increase in productivity led to the creation of productivity in the past two hundred years far exceeding the total productivity created in all previous eras. And when this productivity began to transform into wealth, what we see are one wealth myth after another, various overnight fortunes. Perhaps when everyone feels "if we don't get rich now, we'll grow old," it's time for us to look back at patience itself with a patient attitude.

II. Patiently Seeking Investment Targets

Faced with the myriad of thousands of stocks in the market, how can we find the real targets that can help us make money? This is a question that almost every investor cannot avoid. There may be many answers, and obviously it's quite complex, but in any case, patience is an answer that cannot be avoided.

The method of the famous baseball player Ted Williams is a practice that is very enlightening for investments. He is the only baseball player in the past 70 years to hit 400 times in a single season. He divided the hitting zone into 77 large baseball-sized squares. Only when the ball landed in his "best" square would he swing, even if he might strike out, because swinging at those "worst" squares would significantly reduce his success rate.

As we all know, investment is the realization of cognition. Given that every investor has a different understanding of the world, the market we are in, and each listed company.

Therefore, we must, like Ted Williams, continuously seek targets that match our cognition. Perhaps we are lucky to find them in a short time. But usually, we need to have great patience to wait for these investment opportunities to appear.

This requires us to have firm beliefs, embrace great patience, focus our funds on truly important investment opportunities, rather than trading just for the sake of trading. As Buffett said, imagine you have a card with only 20 squares, representing the number of investments you can make in your lifetime. Each investment crosses off a square. This method may greatly increase the returns for most investors.

Three, Patient Holding

Patiently finding suitable investment targets is just the first step in successful investing. What follows is even more important, which is the need to firmly hold onto those targets with true long-term growth potential. We all know that compound interest is considered the eighth wonder of the world. Seemingly insignificant returns can accumulate over time to yield tremendous returns. However, few people may realize that for compound interest to truly manifest its power, it requires a foundation of steadfast patience in holding. Without firm and patient long-term holding, compound interest can easily be interrupted, leading to the loss of previous accumulations.

The principle is not difficult to understand, but truly practicing patient holding is not easy. The reason is that most of the time while we hold onto our targets, it's rather mundane. The long-term expected returns during these mundane times are close to zero, and the moments that truly contribute to gains or losses are few. Since we don't know when these real fluctuations will occur, we can only obtain certain returns through patient holding.

However, the difficulty lies in the fact that often when the targets we invest in are in a dull period, there will always be some targets in the market experiencing exciting moments. The tempting continuous gains lure investors' minds. A slight lack of patience may lead to selling the held targets to "chase" those seemingly attractive targets. Over time, those exciting moments of chasing targets are coming to an end, while investors often miss out on the significant gains of the original held targets due to this action. This is probably the psychological reason behind the buy-low-sell-high cycle.

Four, Patiently Deal with Change and Constancy

Of course, during the holding process, the market we are in and the listed companies themselves are constantly changing. For investors, patient holding does not mean staying the same, but rather making corresponding adjustments based on changes in the market and the listed companies themselves. For targets with improved fundamentals and optimistic future prospects, one can further increase their holdings; for deteriorating targets, it is necessary to reduce positions in a timely manner until selling them off completely. This is a process that needs to be tracked at all times. The practice of lacking patience and thinking that buying a target means letting it be is not sustainable for long-term profits. Therefore, when facing the intricate changes, it is crucial to maintain great patience, meticulously analyze the details behind each event, and understand the true impact on the positions.

At the same time, no matter how the market fluctuates, there are always things that remain unchanged. These constants are the underlying, fundamental, and unshakable laws that govern the market operation. For investors, it is essential to always hold a humble and cautious attitude, strive to learn, refine one's cognition, and get as close to the truth as possible. This is not an overnight process but rather a journey that may involve many detours, doubts, struggles, and challenges. It requires a great deal of patience and dedication to accompany and, throughout this process, one must have long-term goals and vision, as well as the diligence to start from every small matter.

Patiently facing the changes and eternity of the capital market requires investors to understand the reasons and sources of these changes and eternity, avoiding sticking to conventions. The key is not to follow changes or resist historical trends out of inertia but to truly calm down, endure, understand everything that changes and remains constant, and elevate to a suitable investment philosophy.

V. Patiently Seek Wisdom

For investors who truly see investment as a spiritual practice, striving for a deeper purpose in investment is actually to seek wisdom further. Lifetime investment is a process of lifelong patient pursuit of wisdom.

The capital market is a barometer of economic operation and a mirror of the entire social operation. It gathers the most representative companies from various industries. By studying the business models, products, and development processes of listed companies, investors are essentially understanding the historical development of the social economy, the current development status, and making judgments on future development trends. What is even more gratifying is that in this pursuit of wisdom, there will be additional rewards, as investors often can gain high profits from correct judgments and forecasts.

However, because this process is very interesting and rewarding, it requires long-term accumulation. Many theories and viewpoints need to be verified through personal practice, discarding the wrong or unsuitable ones, and finding the wisdom that truly belongs to oneself.

VI. How to Have Patience?

At this point, it seems that one question we inevitably need to discuss is how to cultivate patience. From the discussion in the previous text, it is not difficult to conclude that the specific answer to this question varies from person to person, but there are certainly some common principles.

To have patience, the first step is to clarify our own goals. For investors, our lives require continuous improvement, constantly approaching success, even if the process is slower. As long as we can steadily approach our goals, we are on the right path. Understanding clearly what we truly want to achieve eliminates the need to rush and certainly eliminates the need to envy the overnight riches that fill our ears. Understanding that the accumulation of wealth in life follows its own rules, focusing on our goals is the starting point for all patience. To have patience is to understand the laws of development, whether in the capital market or within listed companies, they are all subject to objective laws of development. Therefore, whether it is in the search for investment targets or in the process of holding investment targets, we need to cultivate good thinking habits, which means having a process of thought when doing something. Only after clear thinking, regardless of facing prosperity or adversity, will we not give up halfway through our actions.

Furthermore, to internalize patience into our natural behavior, until it becomes a part of our character, truly enjoying the benefits that patience brings to all aspects of our lives, without needing extra effort to persevere. This requires us to have the ability to think and observe at all times, refining everything we see and hear in daily life, making rational thinking a conscious part of us. In this process, people will naturally become rational, composed, and be able to continuously approach wisdom, constantly improving themselves.