Accumulating Wealth through the Mastery of Time and Patience

In the opening scene, I watch Anne duel someone and allowed the young man to win in exchange for getting an exclusive invitation to her dentee. An event she held every year, I think, and she only invited only the most brilliant minds and gather them in the same room, to celebrate how much times has changed and how they were a part of those who engineered those changes.

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They could be considered rivalries because each person in that room would want to knock the other over to take their spot in the voice of history. But I am not writing this to tell you about rivalries and parties. There's this part where Anne's assistant is concerned and tries to clarify why she's inviting her sworn enemy to the party. Anne answers,

Win the battle, lose the war

Her assistant, I guess not very pleased with her response and whatever she's trying to achieve with her moves on the chessboard replies;

The most powerful warriors are patience and time.

And it's stuck hard unto me, because I may not have known what Anne's objective is and whatever she's trying to gain with all of her decisions at this point since the movie is certainly doing a great job of hiding this to keep me wanting more, but Anne's assistant left valuable words on the table.

I couldn't help but remember how much we have heard how time and patience would be the perquisites for wealth building. You know how Morgan will tell you to take a hard look into your margin of safety, not necessarily because you might lose an investment portfolio, but so that if you did lose it as a result of factors out of your control, you will be able to withstand the period until something better come along.

Utilizing time and being patient enough to wait for our portfolio to compound without disrupting them in any way would do us more good than constantly moving it back and forth. Even though we know that a lot of things do happen that might make it impossible for us not to touch our portfolios it really doesn't take away the essence of margin of safety.

The objective and the lesson is how we can't fathom how big something can grow if we allow it to. With our money, whether it's saving to invest for our future or merely tying up loose ends in case of an emergency, the tendency for those small efforts to wind up as big ones is something our minds feel is absurd but it happens.

Warren Buffett for instance is considered the richest investor of our time and even when the media tries to capture the big numbers and his success, you shouldn't be distracted by the fact he might have been a skillful investor who selected the right stock but that what made those stocks winning ones is time.

Time and patience when introduced into the world of investing and financial stability will prove to you that small changes in growth can lead to numbers that were seen as ridiculous and impractical but that's just one of the many beauties of compounding interest.

Trying to beat the market to get the highest investment returns is not bad because to our minds it does look like the best way to get rich. But this post is a careful reminder that Morgan Housel is right when he said the most powerful and important books that should have been written aren't those about Buffet's investment strategies, bets, and economic cycles alone, but a book titled, Shut Up and Wait.

In essence, although it's important to earn the highest returns, it shouldn't be your main focus because this could be just a one-off hit that can't be repeated. Instead, you should focus on earning good returns that you can stick with and it can be repeated for the longest time.