Hey everybody, it’s Michael Martin. Thanks for being here. Happy Tuesday. Didn’t have an episode yesterday because markets were closed. It was Labor Day. I hope you enjoyed the three day weekend. Summer was like two weeks, right? It just flew it. Can’t even remember. It just seemed like it came and went two weeks long. Anyway, I want to follow up. Oh, ganja always gets angry. Please like and subscribe. If this is a channel you dig and you like what we say, we get to see the data and it certainly helps us. As he says it, it helps the algorithm. And God knows when you run a YouTube channel, that’s your ethos. You have to feed the algorithm.
So I want to talk about the mental game, of course, and it’s really important stuff because you never know, man, as life happens, things kind of creep into your life. You have to be hypervigilant about who and what you let into your world. For example, I don’t run the TV and listen to the news because everything is polarized and it’s either trying to push you or pull you, right? So if you look at any particular story and you look at it through that lens, it’s hard to debate me that that’s not the case. You think it’s in the information business. But now, again, since the abolition of the fairness doctrine, I think in 91, everything is very polarized now, and it’s one camp against the other. And I don’t typically need anyone to try to steer my thinking. I like to do my own thinking. You just give me the who, what, when, where, why, and how, and I’ll make my own decision. That’s the last thing any of these networks want. They want you to become emotionally invested, put a stick in someone’s eye. Then have you go to social media, especially when you get angry because anger is the number one emotion that’s shared in social media.
But I want to talk to you about, I can remember growing up my dad saying to me, show me your friends. I’ll tell you a little bit about yourself. There’s probably a few ways to say the expression, and I didn’t fully understand what he meant, but it’s a reflection of what’s going on in your head. So I want you to think, starting today and tomorrow, I’ll have ganja Thursday, Friday. We’ll talk more about it. Who do you have around you? What’s your current environment? If they’d say that we are products of our environments, what are you doing to control your environment? Because if we’re going to set goals and have plans and take actions so that we’re not reacting to things, we’re responding to things with a clear ethos and a fundamental understanding of what it is that we’re trying to achieve. What are you doing in your physical environment that speaks to the people around you? Who are your coaches? Who do you listen to? What do you let inside you? What do you surround yourself so that if they emit any type of stimulus that you’re picking up with any of your senses, you see it. You hear it
Especially right? Because you can touch, you can taste, you can smell, but it’s mostly mental. So it’s based on what you see and what you hear. And so you can go on a diet of the mind and start to cut some of that stuff out. That’s why I don’t even know why some of these places have TVs on with the mute button on. It’s just all noise, basically. Their data points, I suppose. But the noise to signal ratio seems to be extremely high. So I just don’t even let that into my day because shame on me. If I don’t know what it is that I’m trading, I have to get a trade signal from the TV screen. There’s no thing that I would need to know and shoot from the hip on any particular day. Everything would already have been on my radar. So success rubs off from other people to you.
And also if you have people who aren’t striving to make better improvement, that’s redundant to make improvement on themselves, they could actually be inadvertently holding you back subconsciously just because they’re not striving. Now, you can find yourself in these situations too. When you need a boost of confidence and you realize that you might be the hard charger or the crowd or the person who’s has goals, who’s pushing and everyone else, it can fill you with self-esteem and maybe that you’re better than them. That’s probably not the case in that you’re better than them. You just have a different sensibility of different motivation, but nothing can help you grow faster than when you surround yourself with other like-minded people like you, right? That’s what I mean by like-minded. This way. Everyone’s striving for something and they don’t even necessarily have to be in some of the masterminds.
There’s non traitors, but they’re successful business people. And then when you start to hear about their success, you start to say like, oh, I want to succeed too. Here’s how I can succeed in my own way. Sometimes I can borrow an idea or a certain approach, incorporate it, try it out, see what works, keep some that’s valuable and leave the rest as they say. So think about when you look at your day, and I do this a lot in any number of my journals, is I look and see like, okay, what activities am I putting on my calendar? What do I want to achieve? What are for fun and what are experimental? And especially what are those that add up to the goals that I’m trying to achieve? There’s no sense in junking up my day to appear busy without activities if they don’t somehow resonate or rhyme or conjugate with the goals that I’m trying to hit.
Want personal goals, business goals? And so you can look at your environment and say, how can you give yourself a little shot of human growth hormone on a little h d h by finding other like-minded folks who are highly motivated? Even if they’re not traders, if they’re successful business people, you can still be inspired by them to go out and be a better version of yourself. Now, I’m not saying that everyone that’s around you, if they don’t have a goal, they’re a losers, a loser. Now, I’m not saying that. I’m saying that you might find extra motivation, right? Because ultimately this, it starts with having a good attitude. You can have all the discipline in the world, but you have pissy attitude. It’s hard to succeed. We talked about that a couple months ago. So think about the people that are around you every day.
What kind of activities are they doing? Are they nine to fivers who are just going through the motions? Because ultimately that can have an impact on you. Even if you don’t talk about it, they’re not hurting anyone, but it’s not necessarily motivating to just, it’s like going to gym class in high school. As long as you show up in shorts and breathe, you’ll get credit for it because it’s all about attendance. So are you actually trying to push through and are your colleagues, your peers, your friends, whoever you associate with very, very frequently, are they actually in a similar mindset? Are they learning about their weakest link so they’re doing the same type of introspection that you’re doing and looking to make small changes? We talked Friday like one quarter percent, one half percent better every day, right? All you need is a little, it matters, folks.
I liken it to golf. If any of you have ever played golf and you’re on the tee driving with whatever club you use to drive, if you don’t hit the ball squarely and it’s not going to go in its intended direction. In fact, if you open the face just a half a degree on the club, you can find yourself 30, 40 yards from where your intended destination was. So small degree changes can make a huge impact on where you end up. So don’t underestimate how important that can be to you. You don’t necessarily have to do it. That can be your intention, intentions, equal results. So make it your goal to surround yourself with really, really good people, even if they aren’t necessarily in your field as you try to build your own community. Obviously, we have online communities because it’s important to have a group of successful people share their ideas as they say, their experience, strength, and hope.
But anyway, this is really, really good stuff. You can find inspiration anywhere if you’re struggling. They don’t necessarily have to be with traders because I know some of you live in remote areas where there isn’t a community of traders in person, but you can still find a group of people who are succeeding. They might be in a Chamber of Commerce, they might be in like a Toastmasters, I don’t know. They could be in one of these meetup groups. You can look, find them if you look hard enough, and then ask them about how they have you become so successful at a young age. Because if you ask people, that’s their favorite subject, right? Is ask them the open-ended questions about themselves. They’ll talk and you’ll be able to get a lot. I used to say to myself, do 2% of the talking to generate 98% of the conversation.
And so that can go a long way. It can also help you in business. It might also, for those of you who are a little further along in your career where you’re trying to think about running outside money, when you go do that, those people could become, they may already be prospective clients, you just don’t know it yet because you haven’t gone and met with them. Anyway, I appreciate y’all being here. I’ll see you tomorrow with Ganja, and then I’ll have episodes again Thursday and Friday to kick off September. Thanks for being here, folks. I’ll see you tomorrow.
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