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So if you want to try to figure out if you’re newer in the business, what’s the likelihood of you making it go back in your life and think to other endeavors that you took on at other times, it doesn’t matter how old you were or not, but measure your level of “stick-to-it-iveness.” What was your sense of persistence and determination? Because I think mindset is more important than strategy in many ways. A lot of folks don’t even get to maximize the strategy because like they say, if you can’t take the heat, stay out of the kitchen kind of a deal. So that’s where I knew I was going to make it. I had already made up in my mind when I started Jiu Jitsu, I knew that I was going to get a black belt because I knew when I started that I wasn’t going to let any obstacle get in my way and psych me out of doing it so that I would eventually quit. That’s not really what I wanted to do, and that’s just how I’m lucky that way. Really lucky. It’s just how my brain works. I knew then it was a question of finding the right teacher, which that’s a pretty interesting story on how I did it. I didn’t really just show up at a gym to try to train and do Jiu Jitsu. I actually picked out the teacher that made all the difference.
So it doesn’t have, to me is a personality trait. It has a lot to do with trading, but it could be also extra trading. So if you’ve ever tried to take on something like I’ve trained folks who are seals or army rangers for example, so I know they have it in them to do very, very arduous tasks under very, very extreme conditions, and they have that mental fortitude, and that’s why I want you to think about how can you give yourself the best chance to win. It’s just like don’t quit trade small. It’s not about making money at the beginning. It’s about finding your process that you can replicate day after day after day after day to the point where it’s monotonous and boring because then it’s easy to scale once you figure out what to do. So that’s why I like to say, I know some of you are really lucky too.
You just get it short term, longer term, it doesn’t matter. So this channel might not be of great value for you because it’s really written and produced for the folks who are in the process of sorting things out. But that’s where I kind of knew that I was going to be able to make it is I knew I had the right mindset. I knew I was a risk taker already. I was already a businessman. I had already made and lost money. I had had clients, I had built a company and sold it, and so I know it probably seems like it’s best wards to come at you and say mindset is more important than strategy. But from where I’m sitting and from the emails I get and from the comments that I see, there’s a lot of people who just get frustrated and they quit or they trade so big and they lose a lot of money. They thought it would be a lot easier than it was going to be, and then they’re completely stunned into silence and they’re sitting on their hands and they don’t know what to do. And I have empathy. There were moments

In when I was like that. I knew it was going to be short-lived, and I just needed to process my feelings and my frustration and my aggravation about not being able to figure it out. It’s like that stupid clue on a crossword puzzle where you kind of know what it is, but it’s a big 15 letter word and you only have six letters at various spots and you can’t figure it out. Sometimes I’ll have to walk away from the crossword and it’ll kind of hit me afterwards. But think in your life of specific instances, it doesn’t matter. It could have been sports could have been like a weightlifting goal, could have been some other achievement that you had in your life where you really had to think long-term on how you were going to pull it off, how you were going to try to manifest it, where the outcome was uncertain and you didn’t know how long you’d have to put in the effort, the money or the effort, the time to get that all going.
And then you could feed upon that and you could say, okay, I can borrow from that model. I can go to school on myself and say, here’s what I did. Here’s what my process was. I focused on learning a little bit and then I tried to apply that knowledge right away. I didn’t try to spend five years to build a strategic plan and not take any risk because traders trade at the end of the day. So that’s where you have to be with this. As you’re building out your model and thinking about where you want to be is go to school on yourself and use that inner strength. Be highly motivating. I have a whole bunch of that stuff from school and academics. I have a lot of stuff from athletics. I have business success, and I can go back into my personal history and say, here’s what I did at that moment in time.
Here’s how resourceful I was, and so I can learn to rely on myself. That’s really where you want to be because once you find out the trading tactics, it might not seem that way right now, but you might be able to look back and say, my trading rules are actually very, very simple. You could teach ’em to a ninth grader, but it’s how I pull them off that makes all the difference. That’s how I create my alpha, and it’s being able to live with the aggravation, the frustration, and not knowing the uncertainty. Because as I say, or I’ve said before on the show, there are two payoffs to every trade. There’s the emotional and psychological, and then there’s the financial part. But when you’re kind of building your career, you also have uncertainty, which is a type of emotional risk. You don’t know when the payoff is going to come, so there’s a lot of front loaded uncertainty that you have to work through. Maybe the money’s incidental for you, hopefully it is. But I like to think that once you get the system down, once you get your set of rules down and you know that they have positive expected value, at least mathematically, you can see that there’s an edge. You might not be able to articulate it, but that’s okay. You’re just starting.

Don’t put so much pressure on yourself. Think about what your peers are doing. So that’s what I would do is to think about getting rules that have positive expected value. Then try to understand where does that edge come from? Because as long as you don’t even have to understand where it is, if you can follow the rules systematically, you’ll be able to make a lot of money and do it consistently over longer periods of time. Your returns might be spiky, meaning you might make money 4, 5, 6 months of the year, really big months, and then you’ll have six down months. So you’ll give some back. That’s totally fine. Some of you might want to trade smaller and be like, I want to just make a thousand a month and have green months all the time, all shapes and sizes, man, I support all of it however you do it. It works for me.

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The post Mindset is more important than strategy appeared first on MartinKronicle.