New Level, new Devil

Typically, we get breaks in life. You reach the summit of a mountain, and you take deep breaths of accomplishment, along with a sight around you that fills you with fresh energy. Energy is needed for a difficult descent, the energy of having mastered a task seemingly unsurmountable before when you set out to manifest a strongly desired goal.

In trading, with all its moving parts and where single events are, in principle, meaningless since they are random in themselves, it is hard to find a satisfying moment of an outstanding event that gives you the reward of arriving.

If anything, it is more often the case that the better you get, the more complex the game gets, or the harder it gets to improve your game.

In competitive sports, the part of excelling even more once mastery has been achieved might be similar. Each extra millisecond faster or centimeter higher and alike gains complexity and degree of difficulty to outperform yourself, but still, you get measured results of competition, recognition, and other events that also raise the bar of accomplishment rewards.

Since trading avoids emotional extremes, you are cheated out of such glory to shine and must compensate for the lack of such rewarding moments.

There are additional hurdles for the trading entrepreneur.

While the average success rate for a business to fail is nine out of ten, in trading, the failure rate is much, much, much, much higher.

While the general principle of "done is better than perfect" is true for any regular venture or job, the meaning of "perfection is the enemy of progress" is in a different light spectrum regarding trading.

Not only do traders live in an endless sea of uncertainties by dabbling with solutions on how to stack the odds of future events and exposure to a life where there is an absence of control, but the true task is also to never fuck up (pardon my French) and always be in balance.

Let me explain what I precisely mean by my profanity.

Have you ever sworn yourself not to do a certain thing ever again?

It's like getting angry about a specific trigger your parents might have installed, and your mother still finds each time.

Do not overeat or drink too much, fight with your spouse over nothing, or do anything else foolish.

Sure you have.

And your consequences might have been unpleasant if you failed to honor your promise. Still, if you do such a slip-up in trading, if you run a stop and freeze up, if you revenge trade or pyramid into a position, if you take just one gamble over an educated guess and leverage up, if you do just one thing wrong, there is a good chance that you are maneuvering yourself out of business or at least walk away with a devastating blow to the health of your psychology.

Who can never fail?

Who can honor all one's self-promises?

Yes, you can trade small principle-based positions and condition yourself to take only a specific kind of low-risk trades.

Yet the only principle I am aware of that sustains long-term success for the sincere self-directed trader is:

Focus on what you want and not on what you fear.

If there is a tree near a steep curve in the countryside where frequent car accidents happen, most drivers will hit it.

In short, we focus on the object of fear we try to avoid.

We intuitively stir the car to the one tree that we try to avoid hitting when our car gets into a spin.

As a trader, you need to recondition this one behavior of not manifesting your objects of fear.

If you are able to change this human behavior into a trading-conducive response through repetition, you will have managed the majority of your trading problems.

Otherwise, it will feel like an addiction of "you can never have enough of what you don't want," meaning you will keep overeating, keep getting triggered by your mother, keep drinking too much, and keep fighting with your spouse over nothing. Wipe out trading accounts and receive devastating blows against your psyche.

So next time you are overwhelmed by the new devil on the next level, remind yourself to

Focus on what you want and not on what you fear.