Hey everybody, it’s Michael Martin. Happy Monday. Hope you’re doing well. So let’s do some housekeeping. Got a lot of great feedback this past week on the episodes, especially the one on Wednesday that we do with Ganja regarding your health and preparation. So I’m going to speak about that in a bit, maybe a few times this week because it all adds up. Also, we’re in the process of continuing to kind of build out where we shoot that episode. So eventually the goal is for me to go shoot over there just because it’ll be higher quality. Even though I’m not that fussy about production, I do think I have to work on the lighting just because I’m trying to find pockets of time to shoot this show, and it happens basically on varying days. For example, today isn’t Monday, so I had to find time last week to bang this out and get it done in the appropriate way given the lighting that I actually have here. So I’ll probably get back lighting and all that other kind of fancy stuff. I think if I was actually trying to sell something, I’d put a lot more effort into it. Right now it’s really just about communicating with all of you, getting the word out there. If you’re here for the production value, it’s probably not the right show, but everyone has their opinion, so I always appreciate you being here and I say so.
So that’s it. As you can see, it’s getting wintery here. It’s hoodie weather. So I’m dressed up today, my winter apparel. So I wanted to talk about in the ganja video. First of all, the thing about the secret sauce is a joke, right? There is no, if you’ve watched the show, it’s like what are your trading secrets or what’s the inside baseball here? There’s really you making attempts to figure out what works for you, and that’s the secret sauce, right? It’s unique for everybody. There is no one trading system or one model or one measurement or one ATR or one, whatever it might be that would help you.
So we got a few comments on that video. One being around alcohol, one of the social accepted drugs, socially accepted drugs, go out, have some cocktails, be social, and what would people say if you didn’t drink one time as an experiment, I kind of made, it wasn’t a New Year’s resolution. I find those things kind of flacid, but around that time I remember saying, I’m just going to stop drinking for the year, and I didn’t have any problem with drinking. I always try to test myself to see how can I exercise my discipline muscle. Now I’m using jiujitsu as the vehicle and I’m getting a lot out of the practice itself. So I would test myself in these different ways to just exercise my discipline muscle. So I remember saying, no matter what, I’m not going to have a drink for the entire year. I don’t care if I’m going to a wedding. And again, it wasn’t a big stretch. I was maybe having one drink a month anyway, so it wasn’t that difficult, but you’d be surprised how other people perceive you like you and a hey is something wrong. Now that was ended up being so easy for me to do. I just decided to keep going for eight more years. And then on my 40th birthday, I had this big, big ass pint of Guinness.
Again, not because I had any problem with booze, but because I was investing time in my career, I was trying to perform better, and I did tell you in the video with ganja that I would feel it. So you never know where these things can kind of take you. One guy wrote that he would be viewed maybe in Japan as being antisocial as a friend of mine would say, you could take that as an entry point into a tribe meeting. And why would you care what other people think about you? Or if you are antisocial, can’t you just go and have a good time? How do alcoholics in Japan feel about that? Do they deal with the stigma of being antisocial? Is there a scarlet letter A? So I’m not making fun of you. I’m just saying you can always let go of caring about what other people think because it might tie into other things that you’re doing as well, not just around drinking socially in Japan or being anywhere.
You can just be yourself and you’re probably great at it. So speaking of all of that, I think self-image is really important for being a successful trader. When I used my imagination to envision the future that I wanted for myself, when I first got to Wall Street, I had to invent a guy, a version of Michael Martin that didn’t exist before and would’ve needed certain resources to kind of get to that spot that Michael Martin didn’t even know how to get. But I knew that if I kept doing the same thing, I was going to get the same results, kind of true of anything in life. So I had to invent a vision for myself and then act as if I was that new version of myself and I was excited. But with that, right on the edge of that feeling is a feeling of insecurity. You kind of feel like a fraud because you don’t have anything to justify it. People are like, well, why do you do this and how can you teach there and you need credentials and this, that, and the other thing. And the truth is you really don’t. You need what you decide you need. So I decided to be a success. I decided to invent my own intellectual property and then use that not for greed, but for my own financial abundance.
And so I think one thing as you’re coming into Q four, we’re in Q four, excuse me, and you’re reviewing 23, you’re getting ready for 24. One assignment that I’m kind of working on with clients is to look at when you set up your goals, where were they? In fact, limiting beliefs on some level or where did you shoot too low? Where did you set the trajectory for your growth? The growth comes from your behavior. It’s not some rate of return, right? You don’t want to say, I want to earn 24% a year. That’s not the goal. That’s what you think it is, because then you could figure out you want to have those feelings. I’ll give you that much. But what you want of course is something tied to a process that you could actually follow every day because coming up with a number off the top of your head, why 24? Why not 124? So again, limiting beliefs. What are you willing to do?
Do you feel you deserve the wealth? And that’s a deep question. I think inherently when I first start to speak with people, they’re a little timid and so they come up with lower goals because they think they’re easier to hit. But I think if you work intentionally, you can really hit whatever goal you set out to hit, but you have to do the work. I just started, some of you might’ve gotten an email, some of you might be in the group, but we just started a group last week and I looked everyone in the eye and I said, I’m guaranteeing you results, but if you don’t do the work, just get your money back because it’s not going to come osmotically. It’s not going to happen from you listening to me speak about certain things. It doesn’t work that way. You have to do the work.
And so that’s where I figure why does it happen? Why do people fall short? Why do they not deliver for themselves? Why do they take the easy way out? Is it low? Do they feel like they actually don’t deserve the wealth and abundance? Is it because they feel like they really don’t have it in them to do the work? They would much rather get an alert service. So I think you have to put yourself, make yourself the star of the show. And if you’re going to do this, be very, very bold. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to think about, I’m going to put all these hours in and here’s how I’m going to time block my day and make sure I have my hourly requirement every day. That makes me feel good. Well, you know what I’m going to say to that? That’s a blue collar way of looking at it.
You have to work hard, but I would rather say work intentionally because then to me, it gets easier when you work intentionally. This isn’t a game about putting hours in. Again, that’s a rookie retail way of looking at stuff. You have to put time in to understand your craft, but the craft is going to come from actually doing of the trading. Trading is what teaches you how to trade. There is no book. Yes, there’s clever books. I’ve even talked about them on the show that help explain things so that you can get the intellectual understanding, but all of it doesn’t mean anything if you’re not going to ever put it to use. And if you’re sitting there trying to make sense out of things, you’re always going to be timid and timid. People don’t make the bold discoveries in the world. They have to be brazen.
You have to be ready, willing and able to risk your capital to get what you want. Paper trading accounts and these funding accounts don’t really help. You can’t learn to trade around a funding account. You need to come into that situation knowing already what you’re doing rather than going and paying every month and just winging it and see how it’s going to come about. It’s a waste of money. I might’ve mentioned that before. Many of you’ll be like, well, Mike, I don’t have any money. Well, you’re not going to have more money if you keep pissing money away on stuff that doesn’t serve you. You think it’s helping you, but you don’t know what you’re doing. So whatcha going to do? Open up 10 accounts and wing it and figure out you’re going to try 10 different strategies and go with the one that works.
You have no emotional connection to it. The better thing to do is to, again, what’s your self-image? Learn how to trade, be a trader, and then worry about getting funded. That’s how I would do it. I wouldn’t spend money on things that aren’t proven. And if they’re making awarding people, if that’s the right word, or allocating the person the trader’s profit allocation to the tune of several hundred thousand, it’s only because making 1.5, they’re not doing this at a generosity. This isn’t 5 0 1 C, it’s a for-profit, profit entity. So I would say save your money. We talked about that in a previous episode. Where can you find money to put back into your trading account? Well turn off Disney plus, stop buying $10 lattes. Don’t get the new iPhone.
Find ways to find a hundred bucks every week that’s slipping out of your pocket because of lack of discipline. You’ll have 400 bucks at the end of your account, and if you’re a more established trader, when you make a lot of money, your quality of life is pretty high. There’s probably most things that you can’t afford. But I would still do some belt tightening. And in the program we have, we do look at where does the money go and what’s the motivation? Because sometimes one of the goals for the person is to have the ability to go anywhere, anytime, and have that type of money to be able to go do that. That can run amuck and your expenses can add up because you like to exercise that muscle. So there’s the other side of it. When you have so much money that everything just becomes a free for all because there’s nothing you really can’t afford, want to go away for the holidays, take your family 50 K, no problem.
But then you find reasons to do that, and it becomes super easy to spend that money. So again, we go on budgets. What’s your self-image? What’s the self-image? Do you deserve that? Why? It’s also important to have goals so that your spending doesn’t become a muck because there’s always a new goal that you could hit. There’s always a new thing that you can reinvest in to build your assets. Not saying don’t have fun, but without a clear goal, you can find yourself doing almost anything, right? You can fall into any kind of habit, and that’s kind of what I mean when we talk about paradigm. The paradigm to me is the sum total of all the habits. So you want to be aware of how you fall into these things. Some of them could come from your subconscious. When I first started making money, I know I had money.
I worked really, really hard. It was a new experience for me once I figured it out on Wall Street to coming into financial abundance. So that new version of me came with other things too. You need custom made shirts, no problem. Go get ’em. You need whatever. So I didn’t become a spend thrift, but when I did have the money, I did start looking at things that I could acquire, which is consumption. And so I did come up with a goal, and basically I created an allowance for myself to say, okay, this is what I’m going to do. This is what I’m going to reinvest in my business. This is how I’m going to grow.
I didn’t pay for those. If you go to some of these events, the people speaking are oftentimes the sponsors. They come up with the money, and that’s why they’re allowed to speak. That’s why you don’t really see me speak at these places, not paying. I give my money to things that are important to me that mostly have nothing to do with trading conventions or those types of speaking types of deals. So if you see me speak, it’s probably because they were interested in hearing what I had to say more than would I or could I cut a check? I give plenty of money away. It’s not just trading junkets.
So another thing too that I wanted to hit upon is when you’re looking at developing your trading strategy, folks are still kind of hung up on trying to buy pullbacks because they feel like a lower price is cheaper. Cheaper means more value. Oftentimes, you’re missing out when you do that though on the momentum that you need to bring your account higher because the momentum and the direction of the trades going the wrong way. So I used to have a tongue in cheek kind of joke that I would say to people, again, if your goal and your self-image is to be a successful trader, if the instruments chart isn’t in the top right corner, it’s not a trade for you. The trajectory isn’t up because it really matter where it’s been. If something’s going to go up a hundred percent, it has to have been up 20 or 30% before it gets there.
So you could almost use that as a filter. Don’t buy anything until it’s up 20% off its lows. Don’t buy anything unless it’s making a two year high. You can set those rules up for yourself. So just kind of like a smorgasbord of feedback today based on everything mostly around Ganjas video and then I mean ganjas concepts on health and wellness and overall preparedness. The next step with all of that is to kind of conjugate that with your self image. When you envision yourself as a successful traitor, you have the spiritual and the mental and the self-awareness, the traitor psychology, the emotional intelligence. That’s one side. Then you’ve got the physical side. You need to have the stamina in the near term, but you also want to have healthy lifestyles so that you can enjoy the fruits of your labor. Then you want to make sure that you’re working smartly when you’re doing your analysis system. Traders don’t have to spend a lot of time because the system’s built data comes in. They push a button, they get their orders for the next day, no problem.
So think about the things that we spoke about last Wednesday in and around the moving parts of preparation, and then conjugate your behavior around all three of those things with your self-image. That can kind of help you see, okay, here’s a point B of where I want to be. What does that person have to behave like today in small incremental ways in order to get there? That’s at least how I did it. There’s probably other paths as well, but I always knew that I kind of had a mental and spiritual game. I had a physical game, and then I had my professional game, and all of those three things have to be congruent with one another and this and that. So appreciate you being here. We’re going to have a good follow-up episode with Kja, obviously Wednesday, and I have a great week of concepts and things to speak about with you here. Thanks very much for being here, folks. I’ll see you tomorrow.
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