The Third Commandment: Be Patient

Summary: Be patient like Warren Buffett and play the infinite game. Know that is it likely that you will generate the vast majority of your wealth in the autumn of your life.

[To find out what the Ten Commandments of Indian Entrepreneurship are, pls click here: https://marcellus.in/blogs/the-ten-commandments-of-entrepreneurship-in-india/]

“Jamsetji Tata was born in 1839. He started his partnership firm Tata and Sons in 1868. The company, Tata Sons Ltd, was incorporated in 1917 and took over the business of Tata and Sons. Today, more than 150 years later, this business that is now broadly referred to as the Tata Group, continues to grow and flourish. In fact, Tata has been the pre-eminent business house in India for several decades, a position it continues to occupy until today. The thought leadership of Jamsetji and his successors has stood the test of time and has proven its enduring quality through all these years of industrial and economic development in India….”– Harish Bhat, R Gopalakrishnan. Jamsetji Tata: Powerful learnings for corporate success (pp. 9-10). Penguin Random House India Private Limited. Kindle Edition.

“While researching for this book, I came across a faded copy of the first annual report of the newly incorporated Hindustan Lever in 1958. The company was already among the largest in the country and made a profit after tax (PAT) of Rs 1 crore. In 2019 the company made a profit of Rs 6080 crore – a compound annual growth of 15 per cent. In the same period that HUL grew its profits 6000 times, the Indian economy grew 1400 times. It is hard to find another large company that has delivered 15 per cent earnings growth over sixty years anywhere in the world. It is nearly impossible to find one that has stayed in the top five of a large country for over sixty years.” – Sudhir Sitapati. The CEO Factory: Management Lessons from Hindustan Unilever (p. 8). Juggernaut. Kindle Edition.

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‘Be Patient’ must be one of the most cliched virtues in life. As kids, we are told by our parents to be patient and wait for our turn on the playground swing. As adults, we are told by our bosses to be patient and wait for our turn to be promoted. As investors, we are told be patient like Warren Buffett so that one day our clients and we can be as wealthy as the legendary investor from Omaha, Nebraska.

To make matters worse, not only is it drummed into us that we should be patient, implicit in that commandment is the notion that ‘being patient’ is simple i.e. you do not need a university degree to understand how to ‘be patient’.

And yet, most of it find it hard to be patient employees or patient investors or patient life partners to our better halves. So if being patient is so simple, why is patience such a rare and therefore such a powerful virtue? To understand this, we turn to one the greatest batters to play the game of cricket. We turn to the life & exploits of Rahul Sharad Dravid.

“Batting at number three, Rahul Dravid scored more Test runs—10,524—in that position than any other batter in the history of the game. His sixteen-year international career has an often overlooked but significant statistic—in that period, Dravid scored more runs than Sachin Tendulkar….

During his Test career, whilst Dravid was at the crease, the Indian cricket team scored over 32,000 runs, which amounts to 35.6 per cent of the total runs that India made in the Tests which Dravid played. No other Indian player has a score of over 30 per cent for this metric. Dravid is also the only batter in Test cricket history to have batted in more than 700 partnerships; in fact, no other batter has recorded even 650 partnerships so far….

Dravid spent a lot of time in the middle playing more deliveries than anybody else has ever played in Test cricket. How was he able to do this? As Dravid himself told cricket writer Samir Chopra in 2011, ‘My attitude towards batting was simple: the bowler had to earn my wicket. I told myself that I had to bat at least 30 overs in a Test. If I didn’t do that, I had failed. I would do it one way or the other.’…

In the words of Jason Gillespie, who led the Aussie attack in the 2003-04 series in Australia…:

“Dravid had a simple game plan and he stuck to it. It comes back to patience: he had the patience to grind out long innings and wait for the right ball to hit. He had his specific shots that he wanted to play, and he would wait for the bowler to pitch in the area where he was comfortable playing an attacking shot. That made him very difficult to get out . . . The special thing about Dravid was when he got a bad ball, he would be waiting for it and he had the ability to put it away. He did not miss those opportunities to score. This is sometimes the difference between a very good player and a great player: the ability to score when you get the chance to score.”– ‘Diamonds in the Dust’ by Saurabh Mukherjea, Rakshit Ranjan & Salil Desai, pg xxii.

Rahul Dravid retired from Test Cricket in 2012. In the years since then India has found only two batters who are similar in their style & effectiveness as Dravid. In men’s cricket, Cheteshwar Pujara and in women’s cricket, Mithali Raj, played Dravid-type roles but no one really could match the original Mr Dependable.

In the concluding chapter of Marcellus’ book “Diamonds in the Dust”, our colleagues described why it is so hard to be as patient, as resilient, and as successful as Dravid.

Firstly, Dravid worked on his psychological strength and mental conditioning from the time he was a schoolboy. As Fazal Khaleel, Dravid’s teammate from his school cricket team, who also played Ranji Trophy cricket with Dravid, recollects:

“As a room-mate, Rahul was difficult as well as easy to share with. He wanted a zen-like atmosphere in the room—everything peaceful and calm. He was quiet and meditative, would not watch TV much; he read books instead . . . He had his set routines and rituals, even in those days. He would do breathing exercises and clean his nostrils using the ancient practice of Jalneti. It was very boring.”  [Source: ‘Diamonds in the Dust’, pg 240]

Secondly, as his international career progressed, Dravid perfected these mental conditioning techniques. His wife, Vijeta talks about his meditation and other mind practices during their overseas tour in 2006-07:

“The day before every match, the boys were told that their father had to be left alone for a while, and he was. He would go into his room and meditate or maybe to do a few visualization exercises. On the morning of the game he would get up and do another session of meditation before leaving for the ground. I have tried meditation myself and I know that the zone Rahul is able to get into as quickly as he does takes a lot of years of training to reach.” [Source: ‘Diamonds in the Dust’, pg 241]

Thirdly, Dravid systematically and repeatedly sought feedback from peers to identify and iron out his weaknesses. The former coach of the Indian men’s cricket team, John Wright, noticed this and said of Dravid that:

“He never made the same mistake twice. He learnt hugely in one-day cricket—which probably was an area he had to work at a little bit more than others. He had been dropped from the Indian one-day team and then went on to come back and have a very good World Cup [in 2003] . . . He had all the shots but he worked hard at turning the strike over, getting the singles, and dropping the ball on the on side, when you normally might put it on the off side. At the start people would try to slow him down, but then he worked out a way so they couldn’t do that” [Source: ‘Diamonds in the Dust’, pg 242]

Embedded therefore in the virtue of patience is a range of other mental disciplines which only the very best professionals and entrepreneurs possess. At the core of outsized success in any walk of life—including sports and business—lies the ability of a small number of individuals like Rahul Dravid, Jamsetji Tata, and Warren Buffett to train their minds to patiently pursue challenging goals over very long periods of time.

Saurabh Mukherjea is the Chief Investment Officer at Marcellus Investment Managers (www.marcellus.in). This material is for informational and educational purposes only and should not be considered as financial, investment, or other professional advice. The inclusion of any book does not imply endorsement or recommendation by the writer or the publisher of this material.