This is a sample from the the Advanced Traders Mindset course.
This clip focuses on why we choose the “easy path”, and how it doesn’t benefit your self image, nor for your success.
Tag Archive for: successful trading mindset
This is a sample from the Advanced Traders Mindset course.
This clip is an exercise in visualizing mental toughness, and how it applies to both the real world as well as in trading.
This is a sample from the Advanced Traders Mindset course.
This clip covers some of the ingredients of low self-confidence, and how they impact your current situation.
I’m going to tell you a brief story about your central nervous system.
Why?
Because as your brain evolved over the last few million years affects your success (or struggles) in trading today.
Then I’m going to talk about EDN, or Experience Dependent Neuroplasticity and how this builds the foundation for creating trading success (or failure) in your brain.
From here I’ll get into the self-image, what this is, and why you keep making the same mistakes.
I’ll expand on this by getting into the comfort zone and how you can expand this to increase your trading performance.
I wanted to share a unique lesson this week, one that is different from any of my other ones.
Recently I was at a meditation retreat with my teacher. As many of you know, I have been practicing meditation and buddhism every day for 15+ years now. For 14 of those 15 years, I’ve been working with one teacher.
Who I was 15 years ago is not even recognizable to the person I am today, and my teacher is the biggest reason behind that.
She guides, challenges and helps me grow in all aspects of my life. Her in-exhaustable wisdom, penetrating insight and poignant clarity continue to amaze me every time I am with her.
It is a relationship I am ever grateful for.
Back to the Retreat
During a private moment with the senior members, she was taking questions from the group, when one of the students asked a question about discipline.
I wanted to share her response because it speaks to the heart of what discipline, training and taking things to the next level is really about (in trading, and life).
I’ve changed a few words to make it more tailored towards trading, but the message is the same, and all the credit remains with her for this message below.
Without further adieu, here is her thoughts on discipline & training.
Discipline Is Not the Anti-thesis of Freedom
“I’ve often seen in people this idea, or framework of thinking, that force, rigidity, and intensity in one’s work is the antithesis of freedom & creativity, and it’s absolutely not.
One pattern that revolves around discipline is people floating around from one system to another, and another, and another, but what people end up doing is spinning their wheels and never going deep.
They’ll let go of one system because they think it is ‘under-performing‘ for that week or month, all according to our wants and needs to succeed ‘now’.
What we are really doing is playing out our conditioned scripts and never breaking through.
Breaking the Cycle
The only way to break out of this cycle is to harness the power of habit in a positive direction. That requires discipline, it requires a focused training.
There will be a level of force and unhappiness that comes with this sandwich. But for anything that requires us to succeed, we have to go deep, and that takes discipline & training. We have to develop this habit and power.
Michael Jordan
An Olympic athlete doesn’t always feel like getting up that day and training for hours on end each day.
I’m pretty sure Michael Jordan didn’t always feel like practicing or training hard. But he did it anyway, and that communicated something to his self-image.
To transcend our current limits, we have to go beyond what we feel like. We have to transform this feeling of constantly wanting to do what we feel like, and then making excuses in trading and why we aren’t performing the way we want to.
There is so much energy out there today about doing what you feel like, doing whatever you want.
Taking Things to the Next Level
But if the goal is to take your skills, awareness and mind to the next level…if your goal is to be something, do something, perform a skill at a higher level than you are now, then you need to start working on those hidden levels, in those areas of your sub-conscious and unconscious mind where we have some heavy conditioning in place.
So if you want to go beyond the level of success, performance and the mindset you have now, that takes training, that takes discipline, that takes force, even when we don’t feel like doing it.
Discipline = Freedom
I too have moments like that, where I ‘don’t feel like it‘. But what I remember in those moments is that discipline will give me freedom.
If I do the practice and train whether I feel like it or not, this very action repeated many times, will lead to an accumulation of skills, wisdom and knowledge that will allow me to transcend my current limits.
Part of what is happening for me in those moments is my nervous system is reaching its limit to participate, act and execute in a particular way.
In that state of duress, in that level of concentration, what is being challenged is our limits, and it is only there that we can learn to expand that.
We can’t expand our limits while ‘doing what we want‘, or ‘being a lazy trader‘, or spending < an hour in front of the charts and then being on vacation the rest of the time.
That is an illusion, and no-high level professional works like that in any field.
Discipline = Power
There is a huge power to doing things we don’t feel like, and that power is called discipline.
Perhaps though discipline isn’t the best word, because we can easily associate it with some form or punitive measure or experience. But the reality is, discipline is our potency.
If we cannot have it, if we cannot hit the mat every day, or keep playing the guitar when Jimi Hendrix isn’t coming out of our strings, if we don’t push up against those limits, against that inertia, then we won’t grow.
We’ll remain shallow, and we’ll just end up repeating the same mistakes over and over and over again. If that is your experience, then you know the variables and recipe behind said experience.
Habitual Momentum
There is so much momentum to repeating our habits and cultural scripts. They have incredible momentum and energy behind them.
To establish another direction, to challenge and go against it, we will feel it, and that will not always be comfortable. Yet in those moments, there is a huge power available to us, to make discipline our habit.
Those Who Really Develop
If we look at the defining moment of someone who matures, develops and takes things to the next level vs. someone who doesn’t, it’s their capacity to stretch beyond what they don’t feel like doing.
It’s their ability to hold a discipline.
If discipline isn’t our strongest point, that’s ok, we can start with where we are. We can go to that limit, stretch the envelope a little bit each time in a controlled growth way. Discipline is a super power we have.
If you can tolerate insecurity, tolerate discomfort, and go against what you feel like doing, hold that discipline and train – there is no limit to how much you can grow, develop and succeed.
That is a great power we have, and for those who take this on, it is only a matter of time before you climb that mountain and have a successful trading mindset.
Netflix + Video Games
I certainly have moments where I exert beyond what I think is possible, and many times after that I need to rest my body and mind.
It’s usually in these times when we start to have those fantasies of laying on a beach for days on end, or just lying on the couch watching movies. I’ve done that.
Recently after some graduate school exams, someone told me after their finally done, that they just watch netflix and play video games for 3 days to decompress.
I heard that and thought ‘oh wow, that sounds like heaven‘. So I tried that, literally watching Breaking Bad from beginning to end, playing video games for long hours.
But after doing that, although there was some rest I caught up on, I can say the overall experience wasn’t truly satisfying. It was helpful to get that rest and down time in, and we need that in certain moments.
But the rest of it wasn’t really satisfying…not in the same way where I can experience the fruits of my discipline, work and what I’ve created.
Shifting the Fantasy
So I’ve shifted to a place now where when I experience those fantasies, that when they come up and I want a ‘vacation of freedom’, a ‘vacation from discipline’…I’ve learned that too much freedom can be just as much a poison as too much discipline, so that’s not the solution.
Hence I remind myself that it is an illusion, and that I don’t want the fruit of that. What I really want is the fruit of taking things to the next level.
Even if it’s painful, even if I don’t like it, I’ve found the fantasy to be limiting. I’ve found that discipline in training yields me a feeling of being regret-less about my time.
I don’t have those regrets of ‘oh, I wish I had done that,’ because I am doing ‘that’, and there is something really gratifying in that experience and knowing.
I am definitely not a master of it. It’s hard, and I have times just like you that I wrestle with it. But I can say that I love what discipline gives me, especially in my meditation and mindfulness practice.
Highly Successful People
When I talk to people of high caliber, people who have a unique perspective and are highly successful, this is totally the difference.
This isn’t someone just doing what they want to do, or feeling what they like all the time.
They definitely aren’t following the fantasy being marketed by people out there that you can just work one hour a day and have all the money and success you want.
They aren’t staying in the little house of their mind, of what their mind wants, or what feels comfortable.
They’ve put themselves in environments that challenge them, that demand from them, and stayed in those environments through discomfort, foraging their way through.
And for those that have had this experience, you’ll see they are of a high caliber and performing at a high level.
The fruits of their work, discipline and training are obvious when you meet and talk with them.
Ultimately, I think time is really precious, and we should question what our cultures teach us about how we should spend our time, and what it is really for.”
Wow is all I have to say to that.
I hope you enjoyed this article and found it insightful, poignant and informative about trading, success and discipline.
Please do share your comments and thoughts as I’m itching to hear your feedback.
Just Released: For those wanting to build a successful trading mindset while re-wiring your brain for success, check out our Advanced Traders Mindset Course, only available till April 2nd.
In this weeks lesson for the Advanced Traders Mindset Course, we went through a very important topic for building a successful mindset. We covered the three parts of your trading mind, addressing some of the critical topics below;
1) how these three parts relate towards your trading performance
2) how you can tell if these three are in balance
3) why the training you are doing isn’t going to work
4) what part of your mind creates each trading mistake you make
5) how to fix analysis paralysis
and more…
Lamentably, most traders failing to achieve consistency or profitability are not working on all three parts of the mind. Most likely they are working on one part.
This creates an imbalance, and thus when you need to pull the trigger – you hesitate, get nervous, fearful, worry, experience doubt, have analysis paralysis, or any combination of those, and thus never hit the button.
Most likely, you end up watching the trade activate as you planned and hit your profit target with relative ease. The common response from here is frustration, regret, anger (towards oneself/market), and probably a host of other things.
Sound familiar?
The reason why you have this experience repeatedly, is because you are training only one part of your mind.
This is done mostly via watching the market, doing ‘analysis‘, reading trading books, watching trading videos, basically stocking everything up to the ‘thinking-analytical’ part of your mind.
What you are missing is the other two parts of your mind which a) likely need training, and b) are probably imbalanced since you put 90% of your effort into only one part.
The result is…well you know what the result is…it’s the current state of your account, it’s the inconsistency, the repeating of the same mistakes over and over again, the inability to maintain any profits, discipline, or control your risk.
My teacher uses the phrase, ‘putting a big foot into a little shoe‘.
If you are putting something quite large (the mind/your trading mindset) & trying to stuff it into a little shoe (thinking/analytical part of your mind), the result will not work out as planned.
If you’ve experienced analysis paralysis, are still repeating the same mistakes, can profit for a few weeks, but then blow it all up in a few days, you are not alone.
The good thing is you can change this. You can re-wire your brain for trading success. You can learn to train all three parts of your mind.
We covered this in a 1+ hour video in our Traders Mindset Course. Registration closes April 2nd (2015) and we’ve already filled over 150 seats in the last few days.
To learn more about the Adv. Traders Mindset Course and how you can get past your biggest challenges in trading, click here.
We’ve all had moments where life seems to be getting the best of us, where things appear to be going in the wrong direction. Health, family, money, trading…any one of these can test our confidence and make us doubt what we are doing.
Sometimes the waves of life come faster and harder, like you are struggling just to tread water. Perhaps you are going through one of those times this year with trading (or life).
Below are six tips to help you turn the ship around when trading (or life) is breaking bad.
1. Do Something to Help Someone Else
One snowy winter day around the age of 12 when I was feeling quite down, I was wondering what I could do to shift my state from a negative one, to a constructive one.
I walked outside my house and noticed my neighbor (Mr. McDonald) who was in his early 60’s shoveling the heavy snow which had been falling all day. I’d helped others before, and noticed how I generally felt better after doing so. Thus I grabbed my shovel, walked over to his house, and started helping. 1.5 hours later, the task was done and I wished him a good evening.
Walking home, I noticed something shifted. I felt better, and wasn’t so absorbed in my personal situation.
This is what helping others does – it lifts us out of our self-absorption. It gets us focused on uplifting our energy while having a positive impact on others. Often times, this method alone can help shift your state, so try finding someone who could use your help.
2. Comedy Can Change Your Genes?
In a research experiment by Dr. Hayashi in Japan, he studied diabetic patients for changes in health by having them watch an hour long comedy show (vs. patients that didn’t).
Fascinatingly, the patients watching this program had up-regulated a total of 39 genes, 14 of which directly impacted the natural killing cell activity of the body (thus boosting their immune system to fight the disease).
On top of this, even though the 39 genes had no direct correlation to blood-glucose regulation, patients who watched the comedy showed improved blood-glucose levels (key for fighting diabetes). Simply put, laughter not only helped increase their immune system, but also change their genes (up-regulated them).
Try spending 30 minutes a day watching something you find funny and see if it shifts your mood. My personal favorites are The Daily Show with Jon Stewart & Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
3. Fix Something that Needs Fixing, Clean Something that Needs Cleaning
When I was a kid, I wasn’t a big fan of ‘chores’, and I’m guessing many of you felt the same. Now, I have the opposite view. If I ever feel like some aspect of my life isn’t moving forward, or the way it should, I usually go find a project to work on.
This could be something in my house which needed cleaning (a closet, patio, office…) or something I needed to go fix or buy for the place. By fixing or cleaning something, we accomplish two major things; 1) we move our bodies, which helps increase our energy, and 2) we uplift our environment.
Try cleaning your office (desk, floors, unnecessary objects) and don’t stop till you are done. Then notice how you feel.
Anytime you increase the energy of a space, you create a more conducive environment to work and live in. This the very reason every house, spa and travel magazine shows really clean and well organized places – nobody likes to visit a messy house, but everyone likes coming to a space that is taken care of.
4. Get some Exercise, Do Yoga or Practice Meditation
With thousands of scientific studies validating the benefits of the above to our body and brain, anyone of these can improve your neuro-chemistry, raise your energy, or help you feel more calm and relaxed.
If it’s the first one (exercise), try doing it outside as nature tends to have the best environment for resetting our energy. With the latter two (yoga/meditation) try finding a calm space to practice these.
If you are feeling down after several failed trades, movement is generally more helpful. If you are feeling more agitated, stillness is preferred. Simply feel what is most relative to your case, and apply the remedy. More than likely you’ll notice a difference, even if it’s for a short moment.
5. Be An Optimist vs. a Pessimist
Yep – attitude affects our health and performance. The Mayo Clinic, Johns Hopkins, Yale (and others) have conducted experiments across decades studying thousands of people who were considered optimists or pessimists.
The results: optimists were more energetic, happier and peaceful. They lived 7-11 years longer on average, had lower blood pressure, cholesterol levels, and a healthier body weight.
Contrast this to the pessimists who not only lived less (on average), but had a 5x greater chance of getting coronary heart disease.
The lesson being: if you want to have a greater chance of turning your trading challenges (and life) around? Be an optimist. This will help you keep the right perspective when trading.
6. Keep Moving Forward
Whether it is learning how to trade forex successfully, martial arts, archery or sports, you will experience periods where it feels like there is no growth. These can run for long periods of time, and may seem like you are going nowhere.
The problem is, you cannot really predict when your growth will increase. Sometimes your learning process will just consolidate for weeks, months, maybe years, and then all of a sudden – you experience that spike in growth.
These spikes are often not tied to one event, but many, so we cannot try pinning our success on taking one specific action. We have to do as many things right as possible for longer than we think, or you may miss that huge leap in growth.
Just keep moving forward towards your goal of becoming a profitable trader. More than likely, with enough effort – you’ll jar something loose which allows you to take that next step.
There is a statement non-profitable traders often use regarding some of their losses. Perhaps you have heard this before, or said this yourself (myself included years ago).
It is the commonly used term ‘Failed Trades‘, which is something of a misnomer. In reality, there are no ‘Failed Trades‘. In fact, there are only three types of outcomes from any single trade, and they are not the win/break-even/loss you are thinking of.
These three types of outcomes from any single trade are; winning, learning, and failing to learn from. The idea of a ‘failed trade‘ is the latter – that being one you failed to learn from.
However the very mention of the term ‘failed trades‘ brings up something crucial about our trading mindset. That is – we cannot define ourselves by our last few trades, whether they made money or not. Think about it like this;
What if you are 50% accurate, and generally scoop up 1.25R per winner? According to the risk of ruin, that level of accuracy, risking 1% per trade (and R won per trade) will mathematically make you money.
Another perspective around this would be to examine coin flips. How so?
You can flip a coin 10,000x and end up with 50% heads and tails. Yet…inside that 10,000 rounds of flipping, you may have 7 heads in a row. Now what if during those 7 heads you were betting tails each time? Would you call that a failure to bet wrong 7x? Probably not, yet its perfectly natural to have moments of random distribution like that, even in a coin flip.
Translation: you will have losing streaks which will be part of trading. You will also have ‘hot streaks‘ which are part of the same process. These winning and losing streaks come via any natural distribution curve. Individually, they’ll look like streaks, but in reality, this is an illusion, because they are statistically going to happen. Which is why we have to focus on something else.
A Students Trading Process: From 8%-38%
I recently had a student (we’ll call him Michael) who wanted to trade an anti-podean currency (Kiwi vs. the USD) as it worked for his availability. When he first started training with the pair on Forex Tester 2, doing live forward simulation training, his accuracy was a whopping 8%. Yep, you read that right, he was only accurate 8 out of 100 trades.
A month later, Michael was now 28% accurate. I just received an email from him showing me his myfxbook stats. Where is Michael at now? Currently clocking in at 38% percent. Maybe I should call him the crazy eights trader!
(NOTE: To get a $50 discount on Forex Tester 2, click here)
Now when you look at his trading over time, what you can see is the evolution of his trading via focusing on the process (not results). He is evolving over time and continually getting better. If you define yourself by your last two to three trades, you are focusing on a see-saw, which, technically could oscillate with a loss following every win forever!
By focusing on process, and your trend in terms of your overall trading process, you get a better handle on what you actually are – which is on a sliding scale. In other words – a moving target!
Michael kept his eye on the ball, and because of that, his process and performance is getting better. He’s constantly improving his execution, timing, and his read on the price action context. By getting better at reading the price action in real time, he’s noticing a steady uptick in his accuracy. His last two trades will never represent all the effort he’s gone through thus far, and more importantly – where he is going.
But He’s Losing Money…
Now you may think, ‘big deal, he’s still only 38% accurate, which is losing money.‘ Call it a guess, but I’m willing to bet at least 60+% of you thought 38% accuracy is poor in terms of trading, and that Michael was losing money. That would be true if his average R was +1 per trade. But he is generating over +2.5R per trade, which means Michael is making money consistently.
And now that he’s making money, is he just sitting there content with what he’s got? No – like a track runner constantly working to reduce his time, he is constantly refining his edge wherever he can find it. He is using the Aggregation of Marginal Gains, where every 1% edge adds up to a large result.
In Closing
We can now see there are no failed trades – there are only trades we fail to learn from. By focusing on process, and not the see-saw of the last 2 or 3 trade outcomes, we keep our eye on the target
We can now understand how hot and cold streaks are a common part of our trade distributions, so getting bent out of shape by a few losing trades means nothing. What is more important is having a successful trading mindset, which is focused on constantly improving and building our skill set.
When we do this, we will find ourselves making better decisions, worrying less about the outcome of each trade, and making more profitable trading decisions.
Meet Claire and Chloe Gruenke. They are 13 year old twins. Both of them compete in track for their junior high school in Illinois.
A few months ago, both were in a track meet when Chloe felt something ‘pop’ in her leg and fell down. Trying to complete the race, Chloe tried to get up, but she couldn’t run, let alone walk.
At this time her sister Claire, realizing Chloe was physically unable to complete the race on her own, did something extraordinary.
Instead of calling for help, she put Chloe on her back and kept on running for the finish line. There was no chance either of them was going to come in any place but dead last. Yet Claire ran with her sister on her back.
Right before crossing the finish line, Claire gently let her sister down and told her to cross the line first. Chloe saw the bigger picture, and they crossed at the same time.
This is an amazing example of losing the race, but winning at life. It is also reflective of something which plagues developing traders – dealing with excuses when facing obstacles.
Excuses & Your Trading Mindset
When it comes to trading, what is the most damaging part of the excuses you make? Is it the fact you missed an opportunity pull the trigger on a winning trade? No. Is it that you didn’t fill out your training journal and learned from your trading mistakes? No.
The most damaging part about making excuses when it comes to forex trading, is how they affect your self-image. Every time you make an excuse, and then act upon said excuse, you communicate something which dis-empowers you.
Each excuse you give and act upon sends a message to your self-image of how weak it is, how unable you are to accomplish something, and ultimately where your level of ability is at.
This is incredibly damaging because our self-image is one of the greatest determinants for our performance and level of trading success. With each an every excuse we make, we not only stunt the growth of our self-image, but concurrently shrink it.
Excuses Affecting Performance
We all have the goal to become a successful profitable trader. When we parse out an excuse as the reason why we didn’t do something, we lower our self-confidence, particularly in our ability to follow through. When we don’t follow through (even though we recognize our ability & potential), we experience frustration which affects our performance negatively.
Products Of…
In most cases, excuses are a product of two things;
1) Lack of Proper Motivation
2) Unspecified Goals
If you aren’t properly motivated to trade profitably, or do not know the underlying reasons for your motivations, your unconscious mind & limiting beliefs will subvert your efforts to do the hard things when it comes time.
This lack of completing what you set out to do can often be a reflection of being unmotivated. It is only when your motivation becomes larger than the energy of your excuses, is the moment you start to see forward progress in your efforts and training to accelerate your learning curve.
Also, having unspecified trading goals leaves you with no clear endgame, and thus motivational underpinning to trade successfully.
Easy to Produce
It will always be easier to produce excuses any time we fail to do something or reach our goal. We will always have moments when we are tired, do not feel 100%, lack inspiration, had a bad day trading, don’t have the money, the time, the genes, the experience, and the list goes on…
All of the above can be manufactured in a second and take no effort at all.
Before 6am & -40 degrees F
I cannot say I truly like getting up just before 6am every day. Sometimes it feels great, and sometimes I’m tired as all hell. In those latter moments, it is hard to get up, and quite easy to stay in bed.
Luckily, I’ve had various ‘trainings‘ since I was young (soccer, martial arts, yoga, meditation, forex trading) which conditioned me to ‘just do it‘. Getting up when it was -40F at the age of 11 during a Chicago winter wasn’t fun by any means. But working towards a goal and accomplishing something for my day was 99% of the time far better then doing nothing.
It’s true – getting up that one day wasn’t going to make me a professional trader, martial artist, or soccer player. But each step was both building my skills, while increasing my self-image. Do this enough times and eventually you feel like you can overcome almost any obstacle.
Common Amongst Successful Traders & People
One thing you will notice amongst highly successful traders and people, is when they come up against an excuse, they look for ways to get past them and complete their task. Their long term vision is far more important than their short term discomfort.
They are solution focused, thus constantly turning their minds towards finding an answer. This solution based focus, while being focused on the process helps to improve brain performance and wire your brain for success.
Successful traders and people do not leave much space for excuses to enter. Even when they do surface, they are usually met with discipline, focus and a forward moving momentum excuses usually fold under.
Overcoming Is…
Remember, overcoming is the currency of success. Thus it is very important you are solution focused when facing your challenges, instead of allowing your challenges to transform into excuses.
In 95+% of all situations, you are in control of ‘you’. Hence the underlying reason you haven’t done what was needed, was because of something YOU chose to do (or not to do).
Once you realize how much you are in control, there are fundamentally no more excuses to give as you determine your reality more than any other agent.
Going back to Chloe & Claire, Claire was less worried about winning the race, and more focused on finding a solution.
She communicated to everyone on that track, there are always ways to finish the race. She wouldn’t let any excuse into the situation. She showed us all something great about humanity, of what we could be if we let go of excuses, and directed our minds towards solutions.
Unable to run, Chloe still finished the race, and Claire wouldn’t let it happen otherwise. She had the mentality of ‘No-Obstacle‘, which is one of the most powerful mentalities you can have in trading and life.
Every time you face an obstacle or excuse, but overcome it – you increase your self-confidence and self-image. This is one of the most effective ways to build a successful trading mindset.
In Closing
Excuses are some of the most damaging things to your mindset and trading success. They reduce your self-image, which must be strong to trade successfully.
By learning to see what excuses are, and discover how much we can actually control them, we give ourselves the potential to transform obstacles into growth, and excuses into determination.
In reality, although there are great mountains like Mt. Everest & K2, the greatest mountain we will ever climb is our own mind, and our own challenges.
For those who can and do scale such mountains, you will find yourself standing atop all those obstacles, limitations, and challenges, which can bring a confidence to last you a lifetime. It is in that moment that you will see the great expanse, and what’s available to you.
This weekend my girlfriend and I watched the new movie Lucy with Scarlett Johansson. Entertaining, funny and somewhat provocative, the movie describes a woman who (through a strange turn of events) develops an ultra-powerful brain.
Being that I have studied Neuroscience at the University, while my partner has studied the brain from a health perspective, an interesting debate ensued after the movie during our summer saunter home. And out of the blue….the conversation shifted to trading (I wonder why :-0).
We’ve both trained traders, but from different fields, and we both realized there was a lesson inside the movie for those of you wanting to build a successful trading mindset. Below is our key takeaway from the movie, what we noticed about it, and how struggling traders can breakthrough to profitability.
Unsuccessful People Believe in Events, Successful People Focus on Process
In Lucy, Johansson has CPH4, a new and powerful drug, put into her stomach that is to be sold worldwide by a ruthless businessman. After being kicked in the stomach, the CPH4 releases into her bloodstream, overcoming her blood-brain barrier, causing her brain to expand in capacity and abilities. Within minutes (after a gravity defying series of convulsions), she starts to develop super human abilities (or are they ‘human’, just undeveloped in us???)
Philosophical and scientific debates aside, why do movies like this sell? Why do we constantly see movies about random ‘events‘ that turn people’s fortunes instantly – Limitless, Powder, Trading Places, Brewster’s Millions (yes, I’m old)?
The answer is, because they follow the general meme of most media, literature and culture – they focus on ‘events‘, not ‘process‘.
What do I mean by an ‘event‘? For this article, when I’m using the word ‘event’, I’m specifically referring to the end result moment in a long chain of events.
An event is the big paycheck, the striking it rich moment, the they’ve made it moment.
Media typically focus on events because it keeps the dream alive. Nevermind the largest wealth gap in history happening right now, or that home incomes dropping to multi-decade lows around the world.
Events get more reads, clicks and attention, giving people the idea that in a flash of lightning become rich, become a world-class athlete, some super special trader, or ultra-intelligent like Lucy.
But an untold sub-text lies underneath all these rosy ‘events’. There’s a harbinger behind each of them. That is, when you hear about an event, you don’t hear about the long process said-now-successful person went through to get that big paycheck.
A $57 Million Dollar Payday
Richard Sherman, the feisty outspoken cornerback for the Super Bowl Seattle Seahawks, recently landed a record breaking deal of $57 Million, becoming the highest paid cornerback in the NFL.
You’ll hear/read tons of stories, piling to the heights of Mt. Everest in the media about his big paycheck, the terms of the deal, how much it is, whether he is worth it, and how it breaks records.
What you won’t hear about is how Sherman was born in Compton (a really rough neighborhood in California), and how many people he knew were killed due to gang violence. Or how he was the Salutatorian in his High School class (second of all students academically) spending hours studying after a long day of practice, or an all-american track star, or a super late round draft pick in the NFL.
How many stories have been printed about his ‘process‘, all the hardships he went through to get this big paycheck, or how hard he worked over the last 8+ years? Compare that to the number of stories printed about his ‘event‘ and record breaking payday. I’m guessing the event articles outnumber the process articles by a margin of 10:1, maybe even 50:1.
Why? Because stories about ‘events‘ sell, and those about ‘process‘ don’t. Who wants to hear about how they have to work harder to become successful when you’re already working down to your bones? Who wants to hear they may have to put in 7 day work-weeks for 7+ years on end, when you barely make it through a five-day work-week with a family to take care of?
Few if any, but I’m not here to give you a false picture about trading. I’m here to help you become a successful and profitable trader.
14+ Hours Behind The Charts for 7 Years Straight
Outside of the members in my trading community, most don’t know I spent 14+ hours behind the charts for the first 7 years of trading, or worked 6-7 day work weeks at the broker when I was only paid for 5, or how I skipped out on many parties or weekend events on warm sunny days practicing on forex tester 2, and refining my price action skills. There was no ‘event’ behind my current success, just a relentless focus on process.
Breaking the Bank of England (An Event)
I’m guessing you’ve heard of George Soros’s big trade where he broke the Bank of England. But how many of you know the story behind it, about how he and Stanley Drunkenmiller did painstaking research for months on end, constantly getting rejected by investors to help finance his trade idea, or all the other work put into it?
Simply put, popular culture (especially in trading) has been trained to think ‘events’ just happen, and that ‘process’ is less important. You have to reverse this equation, and make process first.
Process Creates Events
By putting process first, you create the grounds for events to happen. Creating a garden doesn’t simply happen by buying a bunch of plants. You need to buy good soil, build a plant box for them, dig holes and plant them, give them nutrients, pull out weeds, and make sure they get the proper amount of sun regularly. Trading is absolutely no different.
First you had to study the basics of the market and the terminology behind it. Then you had get a free demo account and learn how to use the trading platform. After this you had to learn how to read charts and understand price action in real time. Then you had to find a trading system which made sense for you, then build a trading plan, then practice reading the patterns in the market, then train to accelerate your learning curve, learn optimal times to trade, build consistency in your trading execution, build confidence in your trading mindset, and then perhaps shift to live trading.
All of the above doesn’t happen without a focus on process in trading. Only seeing the event doesn’t help you get through the tough moments, help you keep the right perspective when draw-downs occur, or pick you up after a big loss.
Process keeps your head down until you have covered the distance. It helps you to continually move forward when you want to quit. So reverse this equation, re-direct your focus on the process, on what’s in front of you right now.
In time, you’ll find that big paycheck. It is there, and many of my students are now getting that big paycheck.
Like the one student of mine who just got $5 million in seed capital for his new trading fund, or Tony who started his own private fund after doing 110% return on capital over a year, or another Tony who made 100% return in just a few months risking only 1% per trade, which we talked about in our private members webinar, showing his real myfxbook account (image below).
I have many students trading forex successfully, but they all got there via process. There is no reason you cannot be next.
Always Preceded By This
Events do happen, but they are always preceded by process. So take the time to see where you are (and are not) focusing on process. Then build a plan of action re-directing your efforts to each of these skills, create timelines to complete them, and measure your progress until you get there.
Remember, the very underlying reason behind ‘the holy grail‘ is a pill, a one shot silver bullet, a solve-all-your-problems thing which takes you from losing money to super trader. Does such a pill or thing exist in Football, Basketball, playing piano or Martial Arts? No. So why would you think this exists for trading forex?
Why would you think all you need is a system to be printing money out of your laptop and trading account daily? Does having the best bow make you a professional archer? No, and neither does one system help you make money week in-week out trading. Process, and focusing on the little details does.
In Closing
The underlying cultural sub-text of the movie Lucy, is that events sell, but process doesn’t. Yet it is a focus on the process which gets you the big paycheck. Most of the world’s richest today got to where they were via process, not events. Many of them were homeless, or surviving on next to nothing at one point in their lives. Now they can buy a small island of Fiji.
You have a method and road map, now it’s time to dig into the trenches and do the work. The results are worth it, and so is what’s waiting for you.