⚔️ THE COST OF NEVER FINDING OUT
You can spend your entire life believing you are capable of something exceptional, provided you never put that belief to the test.
That is a comfortable place to hide.
The business you could build. The skill you could master. The person you could become if you ever “really tried.”
As long as it stays hypothetical, your potential remains untouched. Nobody can question the results because there are none.
Then you commit.
Suddenly, there is a gap between who you thought you were and what you can actually do. Closing that gap takes longer than you expected. Your weaknesses become visible, sometimes to the very people you wanted to impress.
Can you keep working through that?
Can you be a beginner at something you want to become exceptional at? Can you admit your approach was wrong without abandoning the ambition?
That is where the pursuit starts costing you something.
An extraordinary ambition comes with the possibility of falling short. You have to decide whether it matters enough to pursue without a guarantee.
I want to find out what I am capable of while I still have the time to do something about it.
Even if the answer humbles me. At least then I have something real to work with.
“I could have” is a fucking expensive sentence to grow old with.
In reviewing my most successful trading students,
what separates the biggest transformations is really something surprising...
You often hear massively successful people say you need to 'be delusional'.
You'll constantly be told that to succeed you need to
"journal", "be disciplined".
What's more important is recording your wins,
sharing your progress more than your plans,
Show yourself as often as possible how far you have come rather than tell the story of how far away you are from your goals.
You wouldn't keep working for a boss who constantly diminishes your every progress and effort,
how do you expect you to keep working for your goals if you minimize your every progress and effort?
Here’s what I do when I start to feel overwhelmed white trading.
Sometimes the charts feel louder than usual. You’re frustrated, overstimulated, maybe you’ve taken a loss, maybe you’ve been staring at the screen for too long- and suddenly you feel like you need to do something.
That’s usually when I do the opposite.
I step away.
I don’t try to trade my way out of the feeling, because when you’re overwhelmed, your brain isn’t suddenly better at making decisions. It’s desperate for relief, and trading can very easily become the thing you use to get it. So I create some distance and ask myself:
- Am I actually seeing a setup, or am I looking for one?
- Would I take this trade if I had nothing to prove?
- And if I don’t trade today, will anything actually happen?
Usually, the answer to the last one is no. The market will still be there tomorrow.
Trying to control the overwhelm is not the goal. I’ve experienced this over the years so many times and notices how I respond in those situations is what had to change. My reactions after noticing I am feeling too much mattered. I’ve also worked with enough traders to understand that overwhelm isn’t always a sign that you need more discipline, more screen time or another strategy.
Sometimes your mind is simply telling you that it has had enough. And listening to that isn’t weakness. It’s part of being a professional. You don’t always need to get back into focus.
Sometimes you just need to step away long enough for your focus to come back to you.
Trade what you feel, not only what you see.
No levels or lines. Just look at the chart and feel. Technical analysis is a tool, nothing more. It is the single most overrated aspect of trading nowadays. Everyone uses it, there's hundreds of "profitable strategies" yet 99.9% still remain unable to pull out any profits.
Stupid advice from gurus is ignore your emotions or act emotionless. I once thought that, it's incorrect. Just be emotionally intelligent. Understand what you feel and control it, use it to your advantage.
You are all "herd consensus" emotionally, once you start to realize that you'll trade better.
Miyamoto Musashi spent the first half of his life defeating opponents.
More than 60 duels.
Then something changed.
He stopped looking for people to beat.
He started studying timing, psychology, positioning, rhythm and himself.
That is the part most people miss.
Early in your career, you want action.
More trades.
More opinions.
More size.
More proof that you are right.
Later, you understand that mastery looks almost boring.
You wait.
You observe.
You preserve capital.
You attack only when the conditions are exceptional.
The greatest traders are not the people who can trade everything.
They are the people who know when not to draw the sword.
Musashi mastered the sword.
Then he mastered the decision to use it.
That is a much higher level of power.
Life is so much easier once you realise that everyone is in the same boat (suffering esentially, just as the Buddha said) and that everyone is free to do whatever they want
Just that should lift a huge load from your soul
You can finally walk around and be like ¨ok, cool, nothing is wrong, everyone is in the same boat as me, now let´s live, get serious, and not be so similar to everyone else¨
Life is a sequence of rooms.
You enter one.
At first, everyone feels smarter, richer, more connected, more dangerous.
Then you learn the language.
You understand the incentives.
You figure out who actually has power.
Eventually, the room becomes normal.
And then you notice the door to the next one.
Sometimes you earn your way in.
Sometimes you talk your way in.
Sometimes you invest your way in.
Sometimes someone opens the door because your reputation arrived before you did.
There is nothing wrong with any of that.
The mistake is entering a better room and thinking you have arrived.
You have not.
You just unlocked a new map.
New people.
New standards.
New information.
New problems.
New opportunities.
And eventually, that level becomes normal too.
That is the game.
Level up.
Adapt.
Build.
Get comfortable.
Become uncomfortable again.
Repeat.
My formula is simple:
Growth = new rooms + new skills + new standards + new problems
And for me:
Growth = happiness
Not because more is always better.
But because stagnation is one of the fastest ways to become bored with your own life.
There is always another level.
And when you think you have finished the game, life releases an update.
New technology.
New markets.
New people.
New rules.
New version of you.
Keep moving.
The goal was never to win one room.
The goal was to become the person who belongs in rooms you cannot even see yet.
The mindset on the market as a trader is:
The markets job is to provide opportunities.
Not to trick me, to get me or take my money.
My job as a trader is to identify those opportunities and execute on them with risk managed.
In the face of uncertainty and failures. The mind will resist to avoid a bruised ego:" What if I fail?"
-> The right logic:" But what if you don't?"
In the face of "certainty" and success. The mind will resist to feed the ego:" What if I am invincible?"
-> The right logic:" You are human, you will make mistakes and eventually get humbled".
You are not your mind.
“Just be disciplined” is the most bullshit mindset advice for traders.
I found psychology the hardest part of trading.
I felt guilty about making money.
I felt regret for not learning this sooner.
I felt stupid for suffering in jobs I hated for so long.
At one point I would purposely lose $15k in bad trades within an hour because I felt bad about making money by clicking buttons.
Like “I need to suffer, or struggle, effort and labour to be deserving of receiving money”.
Now when I get on coaching calls I frequently have men and women 40+ crying.
Because they are finally letting go of anxiety and fucked up self punishing pre-requisite beliefs about receiving money, or anything good in their life for that matter.
I’m not a therapist.
But we dive deep into psychology, step by step how to do the deep introspection and actually change your life from it.
You really can’t get that level of change from som YouTube video, some podcast or reading “trading in the zone”.
Without the right tools:
- we repeat the same self sabotage
- we live always feeling like we are behind
- we try keep busy distracting ourselves from deep thought labelling it “being productive”
when really we are not making progress on what we actually want most from life
Sometimes that looks like overachieving gin the gym
But deep inside you know the 6pack means less than the 6-figure income that would mean freedom for you and your family,
But hey, at least you’re too exhausted from the workouts to stress about how far away you are from the income goals you’re too scared to set.
There’s a great quote I love on this.
“The longer you stay on the wrong train, the more expensive it is to get home.”
If you’re always busy but always feeling behind, you don’t have overwhelm, you have lack of priorities.
You need thorough introspection and to get your life in alignment with your biggest values and goals.
There’s lots of self destructive behaviours we do as well that looks like it’s coming from a “loving place”.
Always putting others first,
You silently burn yourself out.
but just like in a plane, for your goals to take flight, you have to be willing to put your own oxygen mask on first.
There’s so much I wish I could share on X.
People just want to see trade setups and lambo selfies to “aura farm”.
Sure there are some 18 year olds that just study trading for a few months and make millions.
Good for them, but for most of us, there’s more than just a trading system to learn.
There’s our whole mental programming to unfuck from years,
Decades of fuckery navigating life’s setbacks, death, betrayals, parents bullshit limiting beliefs passed onto us etc.
Mini rant over.
Psychology is tough, the hard work that most avoid.
95% fail in trading.
95% fail to get a profitable mindset.
95% of your life is subconsciously controlled.
Connect the dots.
“Just be disciplined bro - lock-in”
Maybe I need to flash shiny objects to attract a crowd, in order to educate them on the other side?
🤷🏼♂️
A losing trade is nothing other than just a losing trade.
As long as you apply correct risk management, allowing you to take multiple losses, you simply move on to the next.