Underrated truth: No matter where you are in life, there is still so much to look forward to. People you haven’t met. Places you haven’t seen. Ideas you haven’t discovered. Versions of yourself you haven’t become. Believe the world has more in store for you, and it will.
If you want to change, you have to become conscious of your unconscious patterns. You have to catch yourself in the act of being the old self. And then you have to choose differently. Not once. A thousand times. Until the new choice becomes the new default.
you need a dangerous amount of confidence to escape an ordinary life cos the person who becomes successful has to believe something that everyone else doubts.
If you want to judge someone’s character, give them a small amount of authority over a person who cannot retaliate. It is a misconception that power and money corrupts an individual. In truth, it reveals their true moral values.
A man who knows himself can’t be manipulated. The world’s games depend on your hunger for validation. Once you master your shadow, your lust, envy, and fear, they lose their leverage. Self-awareness is the highest armor.
A great deal of disappointment comes from expecting conscience where only appetite exists. You meet someone, project depth onto them, assign nobility to their words, and then act shocked when self-interest makes the final decision. The wiser move is colder: assume nothing, observe everything, and let patterns teach you.
The fastest way to detect manipulation is to watch for people who push urgency without giving you time to think, so build a rule where you never agree to important decisions in the same moment they are presented, because time pressure is often used to bypass your judgment.
I’m convinced that you can get pretty far in life by just finishing things. The world is full of half-written books, half-built businesses, and half-kept promises. You stand out by showing up. By closing loops. By doing what you said you’d do. By having the courage to finish.
If you trade trend, you'll get a bunch of false starts
If you trade momentum, you'll often buy the top/sell the bottom
If you trade mean reversion, you'll periodically get carried out by an outsized move
And so on for basically every trading system
This is the cost of doing business that's embedded into every market effect you're monetising
Your job is to understand it and manage it
If you try to avoid it entirely you simply won't get paid
There's no perfect system, it's all about managing trade-offs
Go take a look at your setups/playbook or wherever your trading system lives and map its assumptions and failure cases
The stuff you wanna avoid:
1. Mutating your system because the risk feels uncomfy so you get the worst of both worlds e.g. not holding for long trends/outsized moves but still eating the false starts when you're wrong (all the downside, no balls for the upside)
2. Not knowing what the trade-offs are and sizing like a dickhead so when you're wrong it wipes out all your gains e.g. penny collecting on mean reversion with increasing size and then getting fully wiped on the outsized move
Gustavo Fring was right, if you have a problem that means it can be solved. If it cannot be solved then it is not a problem. It is a reality to be accepted.