Discipline & Perseverance are Must Haves In Life and in Personal Finance

Last week, I was reviewing the financial plan of an existing NRI client. As per the last year data, he was holding around 60 Lakhs in Fixed deposit in NRE account.  I saw the amount is FD is just 10 Lakhs now. I asked him what happened.  I was shocked to hear that he lost almost 50 Lakhs by investing in Cryptocurrency! Running for quick return is common now a days!

To be disciplined, we need perseverance; and to be perseverant, we need discipline too! Perseverance is the highest discipline!

How often we have heard our parents/grandparents talking about saving small amounts from their income into RDs/FDs over 35-40 years of their work life and accumulating a corpus for our education needs or their retirement! It is astonishing to think of how a big corpus is built out of the Employee PF through these minor deductions from income deposited and compounded over years!

In times gone by, perseverance & discipline were seen to be virtues – to be cultivated & inculcated in life. But today it’s a different trend – “Reduce body weight by 10Kg in a week” or “Get rich in a month” are words that attract. As the famous saying goes “Rome was not built in a day”. Anything of real value & worth takes discipline & perseverance to build. Quick-fix does exactly what it says – quickly puts you in a fix!

The anti-thesis to above virtues is the need for instant gratification – for example the urge to indulge in a high calorie treat instead of a healthy snack or the desire to hit “snooze” button rather than get up early to exercise! Lasting success is built on pillars of regular healthy habits, routines and avoiding temptations – it works although it appears boring.

Personal Finance calls for us to start early, get into regular investing routine, form habit of reviewing where you stand vis-à-vis your goals and most of all keep investing & stay invested – in short, the only virtues that matter are Discipline & Perseverance! Stick to it and stay the course – there is no other sure-shot way of getting there.

Don’t fall for the tales narrated by some of how they got rich overnight. For every such story shared, there are hundreds of actual stories of how they lost even what they had – the difference being that such stories are never shared nor is anyone interested in hearing them.

Words of the famous Indian cricketer Rahul Dravid:

“My wife and I have built a new home with a lovely garden which houses lovely bamboo trees. I got reading on the Chinese bamboo and learned that the tree takes 5 years, 3 months to grow to its whole height of 80 feet. Yet, for the first 5 years, you can only see a tiny green shoot, but in the next 90 days, it grows into a full-fledged tree. But in those first 60 months, it is growing its strong network of roots underground, to support the tree. In an era of instant gratification, we settle for shorter trees, but remember patience has its reward. These are your years of growing that strong network of roots but be sure when you finally achieve your success, people will call it ‘overnight success’. If only they knew of the Chinese bamboo!”