Hey guys, welcome back to the weekly segment that Mike and I do where we go over topics, comments, and questions, and see if we have any feedback to add on. I wanted to start off by saying thank you guys so much for all the support. We really appreciate it. And if you haven’t already, make sure you guys like and subscribe all comments, help the algorithm and make sure you press the notifications bill so you don’t miss any time that Mike uploads a video and given the content that’s coming. You don’t want to do that. Don’t miss, don’t miss anything here. That’s right. Again, yeah, we really appreciate all the feedback that you guys are giving us and we have gotten a lot of insight as to how you guys feel about the content and we really appreciate that. Keep it coming. The more we get to do topics that you guys send in, the better it is for us because we get, it’s like a direct line, you know, get to communicate with us, with Mike, and it’s just beneficial for the whole ecosystem here.
So let’s keep those comments coming. Let’s keep those questions rolling in and make sure you guys check out the links in the description. And with that said, let’s get into today’s topic, which I wanted to bring up because I had a trip recently to Italy. I just got back from Italy, went to visit family, a little vacation, and I learned a really important lesson and it’s what a proper work-life balance really is. I had I’ve, I’ve always been the guy who just kind of bangs his head against the door to open the door instead of turning the knob kind of thing. I’ve always been a really hard worker and sometimes I get kind of blinded, a little tunnel vision from that. But on this trip I had a lot of really important downtime and lessons and it was a reset for me before I left, I felt like everything was really repetitive.
I was getting dragged down and in a not positive way in everything I did, I couldn’t be happy with the single thing that I did. And it really started to affect me mentally and how I was doing work. I felt like I wasn’t putting out good quality stuff. Felt like when I was doing the eSport stuff, I wasn’t doing as well. And I had this brilliant vacation. I had a great, great time. I got to see some amazing people. And as every day went on, it was two weeks I was gone. I felt so refreshed every day. I kept feeling better and better and better. I was drinking wine, I was hanging out in the Amalfi, had a couple gin and tonics next to the Italian Lakes. It was fantastic stuff. And as a wise friend of mine once said, sometimes you just got to go golfing in Puerto Rico. So I figured my Puerto Rico might be Italy. And I just wanted to see what you had to say about that.
Yeah, I think it says something on a whole bunch of things about planning for one, for everyone watching the show seemed seamless. Ganja was gone for two weeks, right? Because we planned ahead, we recorded a bunch of stuff, we got it uploaded, we did the episodes on Wednesdays, and I totally support if he went away for a month or two. I have no problem with that. Everybody needs to know themselves. This is a game of being completely autonomous and you have to be a governor of all your own actions. So when Gja said, I got to go take a break, I’m going to go do some traveling with the family member, I was a hundred percent supportive of it. I just said, what can I do and what can we do to prepare and we work well as a team like that. So that’s the front end.
The back end is how many times did I call or tweet or bug or bug you or ping you or whatever while you were away? Zero pretty much exactly right. When someone says they need space, leave them the fuck alone. That’s it. I trust him emphatically with everything. And if he said he needs space and he has to go away and he wants to go away, last thing he does is he wants to think about California and me. And we have a great relationship. People need their space. So if someone says, Hey, I need a break, give him the break, stay away. They’ll come back just like ganja did he come back? He’s refreshed, he’s happy, and he had a great trip. It’s good for you as a human being as it relates to trading.
I think there’s, the more time you spend in front of the screen, I think you would probably need more time away. I don’t spend a lot of time, cause I’m old school, I’m og. I still call in my Otis to the trading desk. So I have the luxury of not having to sit in front of the screen. So I don’t have that same sense of urgency to have to travel or get away because every day I’m kind of away. I’m not watching things. I, in fact was telling someone, a consulting client today who’s trading indices, which is a whole other thing. And I showed him some of my best years in terms of the returns. And we reviewed a few of the trades and I said this interesting thing, and I don’t talk about it a lot, I was getting my quotes. I cleared my business through Ed and F Man and I would literally go to man financial.com and get end of day data.
And through that whole year, catching the sugar move from nine to 19, I never had real time quotes. I didn’t have a C Q G, I didn’t have a Bloomberg. And they’re all really great tools. So I conditioned myself to give myself a great amount of distance because earlier on in my career after books and knowing people, you did want to spend a little time in front of the screen because there were only really those three avenues. And so you could very easily burn yourself out. And what I have found out and what Ganja was just talking about is that when you’re at that place where you’re grinding, grinding, ver is a bad investment on yourself, pay off. And two, don’t be a martyr because nobody cares, you see? So you have to have some balance in there where I like to do it every day because then it doesn’t accumulate.
If you grind and grind and grind, that stuff compounds just like anything else in life. You have compounding interest and you have the discounting process. And so I have just built, I said this when I was earlier in my career, I said, my pace of play is not sustainable. I’m going to burn out. And it happens to a lot of people. And when you’re burnt out and you’re grinding, you can find yourself pushing. And that means you can end up being in trades that you otherwise have no business being in because now you’re more focused on the emotional payoff of the trade, not so much the financial one. So I do think you need both balance in between your personal life, your business life, but you also need to keep the balance between the financial payoff and the emotional payoff. And if either of those get out of whack, they both could subvert your efforts as a trader. Is that the kind of answer you were looking for?
Yeah, no, totally. Just to add on to that a little bit, I felt like before I was grinding a lot because I’m trying to be the best eSports player in the world. That’s my end goal. And I always thought, oh, when I was a cyclist, what I was really good at was grinding and putting in the effort and doing more training than anyone else would do. And it paid off for races like a lot. But in this case, because this is a more, I would argue, cerebrally, taxing sport, there’s so much more thought that goes into it. It’s basically playing chess with physical mechanics involved. It’s a lot of work and it’s a lot on your brain. And I’m doing this every day and I’m doing it for four hours a day. I’m doing coaching on top of that and just trying to get a new insight into the sport.
But I realized when I got back a couple days before, actually my friend was like, Hey, do you want to play in a tournament? It’s Sunday, which was two days after I got back and I was like, yeah, it might be jet lagged, I might be. He’s like, yeah, it doesn’t matter. We need a sub. He’s like, so let’s just play in the tournament if you’re okay with it. I’m like, sure. So I was pretty nervous. So Saturday I did my practice routine and I noticed I was having fun with it. I was listening to music, I was enjoying myself. And then the next day comes, the tournament happens, and I match m d mvp. So I was the best person out of 10 people in this match, and they went on to go to playoffs. They didn’t need me as a sub anymore, but I got an offer for the team.
I just didn’t want to play on that team. And it had nothing to do with the players. It’s just not the atmosphere that I wanted, wasn’t the position I wanted. But yeah, it was funny. I always thought in order to stay at the top level, I have to be playing every day and doing all this. And I did maybe three training exercises while I was gone. I brought a laptop and my mouse, but nothing like what I was doing before. And it’s funny because I was still on top or pretty close to being on top, and that was a good feeling, that refreshment and then having that positive reinforcement like, Hey, you got to take a break sometimes, dude,
Well, I don’t want to mention any names because I know who they are, but the team that you were on, the head guy, his, let’s call him Thomas, he’s in Canada, he basically said, I can’t sustain what’s going on. I’ve got too much going on. I’m going to disintegrate the team. They pay you out your equity. And that was that. So you saw even in the high level of eSports on the team that you were on, people are having good boundaries where they’re like, Hey, what we’re doing, or at least for me, isn’t sustainable.
Yeah, for sure. And I also found out that there was a little bit of a different reasoning behind it, but oh, apparently that still held true. I guess he did feel like he was being overworked, but one of the players basically said, Hey, I’m looking at trialing for other teams right now. And that was kind of the rules the last, yeah, yeah. That was the last thing that made him decide, all right, this is a little too much for me and it’s a lot of work, so let’s just move on kind of thing. And it sucked. It was bad timing, but it’s like it doesn’t matter too much. I’m doing really well now. I’m coaching a team and I’m going to move on to playing for a team. I got a lot of credentials too, so things are looking up. I’m excited. Yeah,
You’re a free agent who’s not going to be a free agent for too long, as soon as the word, it’s difficult because there’s no centralized meeting place for this industry. So as the word gets out that you’re not affiliated, that you’re going to start to see and get smashed with pings of like, Hey, let’s talk, we could work together and you could play because you can play several roles.
Yeah, technically I could play all of them. The only thing I don’t really want to do is be an in-game leader. I think that while I can be really strong at it, and I can definitely put myself in that five steps ahead mentality, I really like to rely on my mechanics and what’s going on in that moment kind of thing. Because one is definitely going to suffer if you’re in game leading and you’re playing for four other people and telling them what to do, directing them, trying to read the whole map, and it gets complicated. And so then you’re not as focused. You’re not as aware when you have to basically use your mechanics. And so that’s why I really like to avoid that. I think my mechanics are something to show off. I’ve always been really flashy, but a very unique style of aim for sure.
And we’re talking about valant as an eSports team, competition tournament style eSports game. So I want to talk about this because I think a lot of people get confused. I mentioned this on the other parts of the show during the week where people can fool themselves into part of the grind would be the thinking aspect. They’re reading books, they’re checking out blogs, they’re looking at charts, they’re doing this and that, and they put in a lot of time. I do think people should measure how much time they’re putting in every day time. Block your day, allocate time. But then just like anything that where you would create a budget, you don’t want to run on a deficit. So time block the amount of time that you put in for practice or what you think is work, and then you have to turn off, you have to have balance.
People talk about yoga and meditation and I get it. I mean, not everyone can meditate. Some people can’t quiet their mind, they can’t sit still. Frankly, I think anyone can do it. You just have to force yourself to do it. You can do it for 15 seconds and build from there. And if 15 seconds is too long, do it for five seconds, right? Learn to quiet your mind. You can make anything. Meditation by the way, you could zone whatever you do to zone out, because to me, zoning out is a form of meditation. Put your headset on, listen to Miles Davis kind of blue. You’ll have 45 minutes of downtime. You’ll hear some of the best jazz that’s ever been recorded. Put on some symphonic music, put on white noise, just do whatever and let go and release and just zone out. Forget looking at the clock, don’t look at your phone.
Just close your eyes, quiet your mind. It’ll do some amazing things for you. People are afraid of doing that because they’re afraid of missing out, especially the short-term players. So I would think set a budget for yourself, because ultimately you can’t be on your A game all the time, even when the markets aren’t open. You have to put some time between yourself and the markets. And that’s a very healthy thing. In Market Wizards, there was a story about a particular trader who was going on a date and taken out his chart book. Again, this is long before remote wireless technology and this and that. And they’d bring out, there was a big c r t chart book that you would get and it was gigantic, and they’d bring it out and start looking at charts in the middle of trying to be on a date, a romantic date.
Obviously it’s a, takes a special kind of partner to want to have to tolerate that because how could you be doing work? Well, you’re supposed to be out with a potential partner. But the benefits to me are so powerful. It guarantees to me success when you can detach from the marketplace because your brain needs time to process things. And you could speak to that. What happens when you ask yourself a lot of open-ended questions and then you go to sleep, your brain’s working behind the scenes, even if it’s in your subconscious. So that’s really, really important stuff to do for your long-term success because trading is a marathon. It’s not a sprint, even though you think you need to put points on the board every day, you have to last and go the distance. The what’s compelling here, right? So how do you handle your downtime?
I mean, generally before I had set downtime where I could do stuff, but it wasn’t disconnected enough, if that makes sense. Yeah. I would have some time where it’s like, okay, you know, can hang out in your room downstairs, hang out with your dogs, go have some fun. I had friends and stuff, but I didn’t really enjoy going out and drinking and stuff. So I didn’t really do any of that. But what I used to do, which was really good, was go like 45 minutes an hour away from my house, whether it was at the beach or the forest or whatever. I’d go to the national park, I’d walk around there and I, I’d set time like, okay, you got to be back by four o’clock. And sometimes, obviously time doesn’t always, it’s not the most best thing to model off of sometimes, depending on if what you do is inconsistent. So what I would do is I’d be like, all right, what are the things I need to get done today after this or before this or whatever. And I just said it on a schedule. I’d be like, okay, I got a couple hours to go wander. Now I’m going to come back and now I have this stuff to get done. So it was definitely time blocking, but I realized that more recently in the last three months, it wasn’t disconnected enough from what was causing the stress and that stuff.
So that brings up a good point that’s kind of related, and that is when you set a budget, because first of all, what is work? What is work? For me? I did everything the day before because that was the environment that I grew up in. There was no other way to really prepare. The day of stocks traded in eighths, and there was no wireless technology. So a lot of the stuff, you know, had to be ready to be very fast on your feet. But the key was to be prepared for almost anything. And the only way that you could do that in that day and age, because of how information was disseminated, which was by facts on many occasions, you had to work through almost every potential scenario ahead of time and then have it written out, plan, what would you do if X, Y, Z happened?
So I got in the habit again, because we’re all function and we’re both, I don’t want to say victims, but we’re all products of our environment. And so the environment where I learned how to do things, it paid to be hyper prepared. And the only way that you could do that was the day before, there wasn’t enough time in the morning to be prepared for everything that could possibly go down, because again, there weren’t all these different channels for the dissemination of information. And if you waited till the morning, you were behind the eight ball. Nowadays it might be a little different because of how fast information can be disseminated. Information is a data point, but you have to be able to separate noise from signal. My humble opinion, especially if you’re a short-term trader, there’s a lot of noise. I wanted to do my preparation.
So my preparation oftentimes was from seven to nine o’clock. If I had a lot to do, I’d start at five and have a working dinner and get whatever I needed to get done between 7, 8, 9, sometimes 10 o’clock at night, depending. And so I’d have a game plan for every instrument because on any instrument, I could have four or five different scenarios. So I wanted to work out the game plan. The good news is that most of it could have been relegated to just knowing where I was going to place my protective stop, where was I going to add? Because I didn’t just put on a risk unit and take it off. It was always nibble, not at the very beginning, but very quickly I started to nibble. Cause when I was wrong, I was early, so that was frustrating and I was having bigger drawdowns than I wanted, so I cut my position size, blah, blah, blah. So then I did that. But then I would say, okay, well here’s where I’m going to get stopped. Here’s where I’ll take profits here. I’ll take small losses. And if I was in a winning trade, I’d say, okay, here’s my protective stop if it comes against me, but if it goes up, here’s where I’m going to add more.
And then you work through all these other things where if it goes against you, you’re like, well, maybe I should buy more. But then you realize that’s what we call the moron strategy. When it goes against you, you put moron. So we call it the moron strategy because it never works. You always just end up losing more money rather than if you were just willing to take the small loss when you should have. So I found my preparation was the key to my success, and I like to get that done the night before because then I could ask myself a lot of open-ended questions about how great the next day it could be, and why am I making so much money? Because the answer was my preparation was unbeatable. Now I want to talk about that because you hang out with professional athletes. Everybody knows about the work ethics of some of the greatest athletes, Wayne Gretzky and ice hockey.
Before him, it was Gela floor, who was the leading score of the Montreal Canadians, the most storied team in all of professional ice hockey. They’d have a game at the Montreal Forum, a place where I’ve been now they play at the Molson Center by, I was at the forum. I’ve seen him play there. And he’d be in his uniform skates laced up and tied tight, ready to go at three o’clock in the afternoon for a seven o’clock game, and he’d be the first one on the ice just hitting buckets of pucks working on his hand-eye coordination and his execution. Kobe Bryant used to go to the gym at four in the morning and work out from four to six, have a light breakfast, go back and work out more, take a bit of a break, go into the hot tub, go into the steam room.
Then he’d go to practice and meet everybody else at 10 o’clock. Now, he’s already gotten four hours of quality jump shots and foul shots before his own teammates, Michael Jordan, same type of a thing. These people had God-given talent. But what did they also do? They outworked everybody, but they set budgets and they put their downtime in their calendar in a moment that was good for them. So I think what ends up happening and that you want to think about this, cause people are like, Hey, it’s, I’m willing to do anything that’s the bad. That’s a bad approach. You can’t say you’d be willing to do anything. You need to have boundaries just like in your relationships. So what happened for me was when I said, okay, I’m going to start at five and go to 10, working an extra five hours at night after having put in a full day already.
Again, those are New York hours. Market closed at four, do some exercise till about five or so, take a working dinner, then put your work in. When you set a budget for yourself, what ends up happening inadvertently is you get to say, or you create for yourself a window. And in that window you have to, it’s not quantity at that point. The quantity is in the hours. So that forces you to put in higher quality work. If you say, Hey, I’ve got all night, or I’ve got all day, well, guess what? They say, work will expand to Phil idle time. And there’s nothing, there’s no valor in that. There’s nothing heroic about putting in a 15 hour day if you’re not getting any results. My challenge to you would be to cut that in half and improve the quality of your work. Also operationally define what the hell do you think work is? Is it looking at charts as it talk? Is it scouring through social media? And I don’t know if that’s work. Remember thinking is a form of procrastination. We get paid to execute. So how do you that? Because you actually have special tools that can work on your aim and your precision. They’re separate tools. It’s an amazing industry when you think about it. Folks don’t even know this, but you’ve got the thing with the mouse where you can work on just your aim.
Yeah, and that’s what I was doing on vacation a couple of times. I think I did it three times in total. But yeah, it’s, I guess I separate work from downtime when it’s basically kind of what you’re saying where it’s, as long as it’s in front of a screen, I know I’m working. It’s not really downtime. It’s something I need to separate from eventually. Because most of, even when I work out now, even when I go outside, I work out, go on a bike ride or whatever because I still have my bikes from when I used to race it. It’s totally different for me, it’s actually more of a refresher, going for a three hour tempo cardio ride because I’m outside, I’m away from everything. I don’t have to worry about all the stuff. I got people messaging me all the time. That’s another thing with being in this industry is you have people messaging you like crazy all the time.
They’re like, Hey, we should play. I have a friends list of 500 people, and I have a lot of them messaging me quite often to play. And people ask me for tips all the time because I got in a really good spot in a short amount of time. But yeah, I guess it’s really kind of hard for me to recognize that sometimes as long as I’m in front of a screen, even if I’m listening to a podcast or whatever in my room doing laundry, I still feel like I’m working because the screen’s involved. And that’s really draining for me to be in front of a screen all day.
So now we’re talking about quantity of working, the quality of work. It feels like, man, I want to show the universe that I’m willing to do anything. But you also have to draw boundaries and say, I have to work hard, but I have to work smartly. And this puts a budget, a time constraint. You’ll find you, you’ll force yourself to do better work if you put yourself on a diet of the mind. Otherwise you can just piss so much time away and think you’re doing work and be grinding. And this is the beginning of it, and you don’t even know it because you’re like, you’re desperate when you say, I’ll be, I’m willing to do anything. This is not a powerful proposition to the universe. Right? Yeah.
And I definitely improved the quality of my work, taking a break and going away for two weeks. Not that I recommend that for everyone, but I hadn’t had a vacation in over five years. So it was crazy to go that far away and just enjoy myself and really just deal with some of the questions that I had. Where am I going to be? What am I going to do when I get back? All that stuff. I had a good plan going into it. And then the quality of my work just improved drastically as a result. Everything that I was doing when I got back just felt like top tier work that I’ve put out. And a lot of the plays that I’ve made in valent in the game, some of the tournaments I’ve played, it all just feels like next level compared to what it was. And it’s also funny because I did basically cut my time in half. I cut my working time on valor basically in half since I got back. And I’m doing a lot less of the fooling around work that doesn’t necessarily get as much done. And I’m really just focusing on the stuff that I know is targeted and strategic and is going to get me where I want to be.
Yeah. How did you come to that conclusion? Was it the time of the way, or were you analyzing the production in your performance versus what the grind, if you will?
I don’t know. It’s kind of a tough thing. It kind of popped in my head. It was almost like a shower thought while I was on vacation. I was just like, man, I’m putting in so much time and I feel like I’ve been progressing a lot less than I have been historically. And when I got back, it was almost like a clarity, it was a clairvoyance kind of thing where I would have these opportunities to do that lesser quality work, playing a game with somebody who wouldn’t really be able to teach me anything or whatever it was. These things just pop up, people want to play with you. And I’d be like, nah, I shouldn’t really do that. I should should be focused and I should. It was, I had a better common sense about what I was doing and what I was spending my time on. It wasn’t even, I drew the conclusion, it was just a thing that popped up in my head while I was gone. I was like, Hey, I’m not doing as well as I was. And that’s really uncharacteristic of me. And it’s funny, it was the time away really just gave me a much better vision of what I needed to be doing.
So changing your environment seemed to help then?
Oh yeah. Yeah. I guess it could have been changing the environment. It was also just having a break from everything. I had a lot of stress going on the last two or three weeks before the trip, and so that had all kind of been distracting and everything. If you have a thousand things coming at you, it’s hard to deal with them all effectively. So taking a break and going away and dealing with that made it much easier for when I was coming back to figure out the stuff that I really needed to do.
So folks we’re talking obviously about a pro gamer here in eSports with a specific game, but the analogies are pretty much true for any type of an industry. You get out of stuff what you put into it, but there has to be a quantity of work, and there also has to be a quality of work. And outworking the competition is important, I suspect, because when you think about trading, who makes it long term? Because the long term takes away the randomness in the short run, randomness is all over the place, so you really can’t tell if somebody’s good or if they’re lucky or if they’re bad and unlucky. So you can’t interpret. I was talking with somebody and it was the same client. He said, well, I lost on the last two trades, so I totally sucked. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. The hell you talking about?
You don’t know shit after two trades. You don’t know what the outcome of that was. And the loss parameters were within the guidelines that you set up for yourself, and that’s that you can’t make any determination. It’s like going and taking a speck of sand from the beach and saying, okay, tell me about the beach. What beach is this from? Is it from Zuma? Is it from Rancho? Palos Verdes, anywhere in the Santa Monica Bay? We know, can you tell me, are there sharks in the water? Can you swim with the PPOs? Is it littered with homeless people? Like it is in Santa Monica? You can’t make any determination and go back to the process, you see?
Yeah.
So people have a way of internalizing this, and we spent a good chunk of time looking at that because people, they are results oriented as opposed to looking at the process. And I think you did when you stepped away and you went to Italy, plus you probably ate some really, really good food. You actually ran into a friend of ours, which was completely trippy,
Which is wild. That was so weird. It was just randomly by chance. I was walking in a town square in Florence, and he, he’s like, Hey, is that you? And I’m like, huh, I didn’t know you were in Italy.
Right? So that’s awesome. And when you change your situation like that, it gives you context to kind of look back, because sometimes when you’re sitting on top of the fire, you don’t know where the smoke’s coming from. So everyone talks about having a 30,000 foot view. One of the best ways to do that is to take some time away. People are like, oh, I can’t possibly do that. I might miss something. Really, you’re only going to, if you’re a day trader, missing one day’s not going to mean shit. What is that? I don’t understand that missing one day markets aren’t going anywhere. There’s billions of dollars that are tied into the secondary market trading of equities, and more so in the futures markets. There are complete industry. There are huge, when you think about commodities, very different business. And if industries couldn’t hedge their basis risk, some of those industries wouldn’t even exist anymore.
So it’s a very different mindset. Futures markets aren’t going anywhere. Yes, there are certain things that would delist because they lose volume or blah, blah, blah, but for the most part, the secondary market trading of stocks and futures aren’t going anywhere, which also means the derivative trading on set underlying instruments isn’t going anywhere either. So you could easily miss a couple of days or some weeks and do yourself a whole bit of good in terms of preparing and refreshing your brains so that you come back with a new outlook on stuff. Because when you’re not doing the same thing day after day, you can look back and say, okay, last week this time, last week I was sitting in front of the screen, or this time last week I was in the damn discord, which isn’t getting me anywhere. So you have to be your own judge and jury and look at that stuff and become a mediator. An arbitrator, so to speak, of where are you putting your time, money, and your effort.
Yeah. And it was a really good tool, just being away for that amount of time, and look, by every metric, two weeks is a good amount of time that theoretically you should be missing quite a bit if you’re gone two weeks and you know, don’t have access to a whole lot. I didn’t miss a whole lot. All the stuff that I missed wasn’t that time sensitive. And I know obviously some things are, but it’s from what I got out of it, I don’t care if I missed time sensitive stuff. It remodeled my subconscious in a way that I was aware of, and I was doing it on purpose. I wasn’t just going mindlessly on a vacation. I was like, look, I know something’s going on. I feel like I’m in a funk. Let’s try and figure this out. I’m going to go to enjoy myself because I haven’t done that in a while.
And I did that, and it felt like the whole time I was there, I was slowly picking apart stuff that I was doing and kind of chewing on it and thinking it over while I was having a gin and tonic at the Italian Lakes. And it was just fantastic stuff. I was having a bini in Venice. I mean, who does that shut up? No, no, I, it’s just fantastic. No, seriously. So I was at a restaurant in Barran, which is a Venetian island, and there it was this beautiful fish place, you know, had to put your order in the day before so they could catch your fish in the morning. And I’m sitting there having a bini eating this beautiful seafood risotto, and I started thinking, I’m like, man, I really got to figure this out. I got to change things around how I’m doing stuff.
And I just sat on that and it ended up working out great when I came back. It’s just so funny to me. Like I feel like I got to do that once a year now because I was still getting work done before as a person who’s very process oriented. We’ve talked about it quite a bit. I’m very focused on the process. I do definitely get blindsided by my ability to grind, and it definitely wears on my mentality quite a bit, and I kind of forget that sometimes. So being away helped me dissect some of the things that I was having trouble with and put it together in a really, really effective way when I came back.
So I think folks, some of the key takeaways are is that quantity doesn’t, is not better than quality. You have to have a balance between both. You also have to have a balance of the quantity and the quality of work that you put in for your profession and what you put into your personal life. Because as they say in The Shining, the movie, the Shining all work and no play make Jack doll boy, if you know what I mean. Yeah. So plan in time have deliberately plan in time away from the marketplace because you can study charts, you can study fundamentals, you can be engaged with a support group, which I don’t know why anyone would do that, because trading is a solitary thing. You don’t need that. You need some time off from the whole process that you can go back and reflect on your own behavior because behavior predicts where you end up.
You can’t do that during the day when you’re watching your levels or what have you, especially if you don’t put your orders in ahead of time like I do. So again, under the chapter of studying yourself, this might be a good way to actually refresh the system, so to speak, reboot control, alt delete, so to speak on your system and come back with a clear head because then you could better evaluate your own behavior. The changes, what ends up happening is don’t be afraid to take one step backwards. It’s because it’s not really a step backwards. You probably see it that way, but I’ll use the analogy anyway, take a step back to take two steps forward. Right, because the goal here is about performance. It’s not worried about any one particular day.
Most definitely. And also for me specifically, I had downtime before I left. It’s not like I just worked super hotter all the time, even though I kind of did, but I still had planned downtime, but I kind of didn’t realize that that downtime became stale. It wasn’t the same thing that it used to be, and I didn’t get as much refreshment out of it. So if you’re feeling like that, then maybe try and reassess what your downtime really is going to look like and make sure that you have it allocated in a time slot that works for what you do. Yes. And yeah, I think those are all really good takeaways for today. Do you have anything else to add, Mike?
Nope. Thanks very much for being here, folks. I always appreciate the feedback. Every time I speak about a lesson, I jot down the notes. Obviously I read the transcript and I kind of go to school on myself. So there’s never done right. The work is never done.
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Thank you guys again for watching this episode. We really appreciate it. Make sure you guys subscribe. All comments, help the algorithm. Make sure you click the notifications bell so you get notified every time that Mike uploads a video. And we will see you guys in the next one. Thanks
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