In September 2020, I bought call options on $SPG, Simon Property Group. I was betting that, come the end of December, the stock price of America’s largest mall owner would rebound past $75, on the strength of COVID optimism and potential new use cases for SPG’s properties. Today, a share of $SPG sells for $124.50.

This wasn’t an unusual bet for me to place. I also bet on UPS in August of last year, when newly appointed Postmaster Louis DeJoy oversaw the disassembly of integral mail-sorting machines leading up to the 2020 election. I bought cryptocurrencies around the time of the Bitcoin Halving in May, as previous ‘halvings’ had pushed crypto prices to new highs.

I’m clearly a gambler. Still, in hindsight, each of these investments should have been profitable. By 2021, Simon Property Group’s stock price exceeded $85. UPS increased by about 10% over the relevant period. Bitcoin’s price septupled from the time I bought it to its all-time high in April 2021. The $1,000 of Dogecoin that I bought in April 2020 was worth about $260,000 a year later.

Regrettably, I didn’t see much of those profits. Demonstrating what’s known on r/wallstreetbets as paper hands, I got nervous and cashed out when my investments weren’t immediately fruitful*. Sometimes I sold for a loss, but often I just sold for less than what I would have earned, had I held on to my assets for longer.

*Investors with diamond hands, conversely, hold on to their assets through adversity.

I succeeded in developing a strategy, which I expected to be the difficult part. But my inability to ride out turbulence in the market prevented me from realizing the profits my investments could have yielded. Somewhat separately, if I had been willing to park my money in an index fund ($SPY, say) over the course of 2020, I certainly would have been more successful than I ended up being gambling on sharp price changes via options. But I had neither the forethought to plan with patience (index fund) nor the patience itself to ride out difficulty with my riskier bets (options).

Patience is, of course, the subject of this post. From my work, my social life, and my investments, I’ve been noticing how patience has improved outcomes in several aspects of my life. I’ve also realized just how averse I’ve been to patience until now — especially to what I’m calling indeterminate patience.

It’s fairly easy, I think, to exercise patience when an outcome is expected. Take the marshmallow test. If I know a second marshmallow is coming, I can wait to eat the first. Even if you don’t know what the outcome will be, waiting with the guarantee of some outcome is usually manageable. It’s easy to wait, too, when you know how long you’ll be waiting.

But indefinite patience for an uncertain outcome — indeterminate patience — is a capacity I’ve only begun to develop, particularly after my college graduation in May 2019. The timing makes sense; there are few times in the structured environment of education when you need to practice that type of patience. You bounce from year to year, summer to summer, with complete knowledge of what lies in store. Your assignments are reliably returned, and you can sometimes plan out your curriculum years in advance, due to major requirements or lack of choice.

There are, of course, circumstances throughout your education that demand something bordering indeterminate patience. If you want to earn captaincy for your team or presidency for your club, you may need to wait until you have sufficient experience and status within that organization to reach your goal. But there’s still a process, a structure, a promise that by fulfilling certain criteria, you will have a chance to succeed. You know how long it will take, and you know what you will need to do to increase your odds of success.

After earning my bachelor’s degree, though, I, along with countless peers, stepped away from structure for what seemed like the first time. I’d experienced unstructured life for set periods — think summer internships or a semester abroad — but never indefinitely.

With that lack of structure (alternatively, freedom) came an inability to envision my non-immediate future. I became frightened by uncertainty to the point that I neglected to consider my future at all; my fear manifested as short-termism. I took financial risks, gambling on the stock market and in casinos (although I’m not giving up poker). I took professional risks, leaving my first job after college well within a year. I took risks in my personal relationships. Given my impatience to invest over time in various facets of my life, I took shortcuts and hoped that I could luck my way into immediate gains — which I told myself could translate into a leg up for… well, whatever came next.

I’ve settled into myself since graduating, and some criteria for success, at least for this stage of life, have emerged for me: hard work, intention, empathy, and patience.

But only in the past few months have I begun to appreciate how easily one’s prospects can improve through disciplined investment over time. For instance, I hope and believe that I’ll become the manager of my engineering team by the end of the year, despite having joined my company only six months ago. This would be, of course, partially due to circumstance and good fortune, but my drive and effort — inspired by my commitment to working here for the foreseeable future — are already bearing fruit. If I were in this position at an earlier point of my life, I have no doubt that I would have become discouraged by the level of investment that success demanded.

That being said, I don’t want to come off as a ride-or-die commitment advocate. There’s certainly a knowledge threshold for a given investment, after which I believe you’re justified in severing it. If you know that the job is wrong for you, you should leave. Paying mind to the sunk cost fallacy, the difficulty lies in determining when you know enough to make a decision.

In terms of decision-making, then, I suppose I consider patience to be the choice to continue to collect information, so the best decision-makers are the most able to realize when they’ve developed sufficient knowledge about a situation or investment to make a judgment. I, for one, am guilty of overestimating my level of knowledge of a given investment, which has historically brought me to rash decisions.

I want to emphasize, though, that patience is a practical option. I don’t believe that it is an inherent good or that it should be practiced for its own sake. Rather, it offers two primary benefits at the expense of time (and however you would use that time): knowledge and the myriad benefits of commitment*.

*I’ve portrayed commitment and patience almost interchangeably in this post, and I should address that conflation. Commitment and patience are not the same. However, I believe that they should be employed together in almost all situations that demand indeterminate patience. If you’re patient but non-committal, you won’t be incentivized to pour your full efforts into an endeavor, and you won’t have the belief to stick by your investments. If you’re committed but impatient, you’ll be unable to realize the full benefits of your investments and will probably become embroiled in self-loathing from your constitutional inconsistencies. Employing patience and commitment in tandem requires intention, and it requires discipline. I’ve failed to embody all of these qualities at times, but I’m striving now to equal my own principles.

Because the majority of benefits you can earn (a healthy relationship, a fulfilling professional position, a successful portfolio, etc.) require commitment, patience by default, upon entering an investment, should be a winning strategy. In other words, if you have to commit to something to find success, you should probably commit to commitment generally. Through your patience (and accompanying commitment), you’ll eventually develop sufficient knowledge to determine whether your investment is worthwhile. If it is, you hold; if it’s not, you cash out.

Not all investments are worthy of your limited resources, but lacking patience with your investments will prevent you from realizing the full benefits of any. So be deliberate in your choices of investment, and have enough confidence in your initial judgments to exercise patience until given sufficient reason to do otherwise.