Several years ago I purchased stock in a small Wisconsin-based company in the hopes that it would make it big. It did pretty good for a while, but recently has had some struggles.
Last August, September, and October were pretty rough. I am sure you can remember those three consecutive months last year when we started losing hope. Nothing seemed to go right. Any news was bad news.
And then November and December provided us with a huge surprise. Suddenly and most unexpectedly things started looking up.
It is really easy to give up hope when things are persistently not going our way. We start to think we made a mistake. We start to question our strategy. We start to question whether improvement will ever come.
We reach a point where we either commit to following our process and seeing it through no matter what or we let the persistent waves of irrefutable doubt drown us like a tsunami.
Perseverance is the most underrated skill for success in life, and, in my humble opinion, it is a skill we are losing. Technology has structured much of our lives so that we get exactly what we want when we want it. Don’t like what is on TV, there are thousands of options to make you happy. You can have exactly what you want delivered to your front door tomorrow (or even today).
We have been conditioned so that our expectations for immediate gratification are very high while our patience with companies, people, or the financial markets who do not meet our expectations is very low.
Thankfully, I kept my patience in my small Wisconsin company through their rough patch in late summer and early fall. While their stock price has not changed, the Green Bay Packers pulled it together and made the playoffs — which certainly exceeded my expectations for this season.
This could also be a tough year for your portfolio. Election years are pretty unpredictable, and this election year is shaping up to be stranger than most. When you start to lose hope due to the hyper-partisan jibber jabber tsunami, recommit to your long-term plan. It is the best way to exceed your expectations.
Quote of the week: Ralph Ransom: “All life demands struggle. Those who have everything given to them become lazy, selfish, and insensitive to the real values of life. The very striving and hard work that we so constantly try to avoid is the major building block in the person we are today.”
Graphic Source: iStock 1362472868, Credit:Oleksandr Hruts