The Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”
The same is true of investment. Good investing is not an “event” like finding the next growth company or catching the next market turn. Rather, good investing is a disciplined process that converts research and training into a well-tested methodology, and then makes a habit of following that approach day after day.
Because profits are enjoyable, investors often believe that they are “paid” when their good ideas are comfortably working out, but that is an illusion. If you carefully study the returns of successful investors, you’ll find that their profits are more often a sort of delayed payment for actions they took much earlier: maintaining their investment discipline even when it wasn’t working in the short run; cutting losses when evidence changed; and establishing investment positions when it was often uncomfortable to do so.