9. Increase Your Awareness and Stop Complaining
If I was to ask you what you thought humanities greatest collective hobby was, what would you say? I personally think that it is complaining and whining. People can’t seem to get enough of it - so much so that it seems to me to be the collective hum of civilisation.
Whether I am right or not, on the surface it probably doesn’t appear that it would have much to do with trading, but I hope that as I explain further you start to believe me it does. The fact is that you don’t trade outside the context of your psychology. Your psychology is in that way the instrument through which your system is traded.
We may hold a view that in order to trade well we need to stick to the specifics of our system - and we would be right - but we also have to understand to the best of our ability the ‘what’ that is doing the trading and executing our trade management, which is our psychology and our mind.
This is why I consider it a necessary part of your development as a trader to spend time developing your ‘knowledge of self’, and learning about self-awareness and self-analysis.
If you raced cars for a living, you wouldn’t question how important it would be to understand many technical details about the car, and those subtle nuances to driving it that can give you an edge over your fellow drivers. For some reason when it comes to trading however, people think that their psychology, emotions and self-awareness don’t matter. They want to act like they are trading in a vacuum.
Many people want to reduce trading down to its logical technical aspects exclusively, and forget that the most complex part of a trading system is the vehicle which is doing the trading. My experience has been that without developing our understanding about our habits, preferences, and cognitive bias, it is hard to see our weaknesses let alone work on reducing them.
If we trade a system that other people have proven to be profitable, and are not able to trade it profitably, then the only place we have to look for the problem is ourselves (assuming our technology or broker isn’t letting us down).
I have a friend who has been a trading buddy for a number of years. He is most definitely smarter than me, but even though we have been trading for a similar amount of time, and we talk over every interesting angle and edge that either of us find, I am profitable and he still isn’t (and no I can’t get him to attempt to trade my system).
I am fairly certain that the reason I am profitable and he still struggles is that I have devoted much time and effort to understand myself and my psychology.
I don’t try and reduce everything down to logic, without seeing the significant part that my mentality and general level of understanding about myself plays in the trading process, but it seems that he knows what he knows, and nothing will convince him that a change of path may be necessary.
The idea that you need to be more self-aware isn’t very helpful however unless you have some guide around how to start the process. I am a big fan of Tim Ferris, the author of “The Four Hour Work Week” who has one of the most successful podcasts on the internet.
Tim Ferris interviews a great number of leaders in particular fields, and has said that about 80% of the extremely successful people he has interviewed undertook some form of regular meditation. I have meditated for many years and can highly recommend you undertake some regular form of mindfulness meditation. It will provide many benefits beyond an improvement in your trading performance.
Another important part of becoming a successful trader is ensuring you adopt a mindset which focuses on removing actions that are not helpful or are counterproductive. One of those counterproductive mental actions is complaining about life.
It is remarkable how pervasive the hobby of complaining about life is, and it is probably not until you start to take notice of when and how often you do it that you have a chance of realising how much time you are wasting, and how much optimism and mental energy it is draining from you.
The reality is that complaining about life doesn’t improve life at all, and we know from our own experience that the most successful people in our life are definitely not the most negative people, or the people that complain the most.
If something in life needs fixing or changing then FIX IT or CHANGE IT, but stop you’re whining - because you are wasting time and energy, and complaining about life does nothing to bring you closer to your goals.
Seriously… STOP IT. I promise this strategy is more important than you appreciate.
