We're taught this at a young age, but more and more patience seems to be an overlooked quality, or maybe even outdated quality. Nowadays with smartphones carrying the internet with us, there's really no need to wait anymore. If I'm stuck on the elevator, I'll just look at my phone. If I'm waiting for my friend, I'll look at my phone. If I'm sitting on the toilet with nothing to do, I'll just look at my phone. The whole idea of patience kind of goes out the window; it's not a question of how much time I have to wait, just how many YouTube videos I can look at in that span, or news articles, or Facebook feeds.
Looking at it economically, we're not getting rewarded for patience anymore. There's no incentives for patience. Amazon specifically started a 1-day shipping program into which it invested a lot of cash (and throttled the growth of its share price in the last year, to my chagrin) just to placate the "Right now!" needs of consumers. If we wait to develop an idea, someone else might have come up with it already- like Uber, I'd hate to be the guy who thought of carsharing services but got beat to the market by Uber.
Personally, I think it's a shame, because I grew up a pretty impatient person, but because I was impatient and often punished for that, I saw the values of being impatient. Being patient to move a chess piece after I had thought it all the way through, for example, or waiting to buy a stock not at the all-time high but waiting a bit until it pulls back a little, or staying with learning Chinese even though I didn't see any value in it, until it actually pays off in the end. People of my generation, me included, are too focused on the instant gratification and not the long-term investment of things, which is why millennials don't buy houses (well, also they can't afford them) or have extra savings, or invest in the stock market. Higher education is doing well, but that's more of the perception of college as a necessity (and parents paying for it) as well as college being pretty fun, but I wonder if education eventually will be bypassed due to impatience.
And finally I wonder sadly if Kobe had been more patient, would he have passed away so tragically? It's unfair to ask what ifs after the fact, and the full investigation of the helicopter crash will take months, but the whole idea of a helicopter is to get somewhere faster without hassle, but along with that expedited trip there's added risk, especially on a cloudy day in Los Angeles where the lack of visibility caused the LAPD to suspend its helicopter routes. So one wonders if someone made the decision to go with the helicopter anyway. I've done it many times, knowing something is probably riskier given the conditions but doing it anyway, like crossing a double yellow line on a road if I'm running late. And there's inherent risks in driving too, even if Kobe had decided not take a helicopter and just taken a limo or something. Sometimes our fates are just out of our hands, unfortunately.
脚踏实地
There was another idiom I was going to write about, loosely translated to "feet touching solid ground," or work hard on the fundamentals and make steady progress. Very underestimated in today's society of instant stardom and taking shortcuts to get to where you need to be. One Youtube video or Instagram post can make you famous overnight, so why struggle for months and years to achieve success? But like Warren Buffet with stock returns (invest in stocks, don't just trade them!) Kobe worked on his craft day after day, year after year, going into the gym every summer even after the season was over to work on new parts of the game. "First in the gym, last one to leave"- wasn't a phrase that Kobe invented, but he's the one I most associate with. You have to have a lot of patience for that hard work and practice to pay off, and Kobe did it enough to become one of the all time greats.
I'm a big "steadily making progress" stocks too, and truly appreciate the long-term solid fundamental companies whose charts just look like a solid line going straight up, not much parabolic activity going up nor a sharp downturn that could cause a lot of stress. HD (Home Depot) and MCD (McDonald's) come to mind as just great all-American companies that I own with a dividend. Don't really get bothered by business cycles ("cyclicality"). That's kind of the human being I want to be too......slow, steady progress.
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan
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