Hey everybody. Happy Friday. Hope you have had a good week and you have exciting plans for the weekend. I know I’m going to see, lemme just check the date here. Yeah, I think I have good plans. Lemme see. Yeah, none other than my good friend Sean McLaughlin, Chicago Show is going to be in town, so we’re going to have a bite to eat, a bite to drink that we go hard on Saturday night. So I’m looking forward to seeing him. Great guy. And there you have it. So I want to talk to you today again and kind of summarize some things we talked about this week, especially from Tuesday and yesterday’s episode in that as far as your career goes and your aspirations for trading, even if you’ve been in the business 10 years and you want to expand, you are both at the same time, the pilot and the navigator of that process.
We live in a paradigm of personal responsibility. If something’s not working, you haven’t put focus on it and it’s kind of your fault, and I’m not putting a stick in your eye, but as soon as you start to accept responsibility for what is either working or not working in your life, in your career, the sooner you can say, I am the solution. Right? I am the solution and I need to ask better questions of myself. Open-ended questions and find those answers. And it’s okay to feel stonewalled. It’s okay to feel like you’re not making any progress if you can’t push through this barrier. But if you’re persistent and you ask yourself good, open-ended questions, I believe that you can take a little personal inventory and figure it out. And I use that analogy because it’s something that’s very, very important to me. It doesn’t allow me to become a victim ever.
I don’t get the poor me because I’m insulated from that bullshit just not going to happen. If there’s something I want in my life or there’s something that I don’t have, I haven’t dreamed a big enough dream, you see? And so I always say to myself, I’m always sitting at the head of the table no matter what seat I’m in, and I am the pilot and the navigator, and I have to make it happen. And if I’m lazy, it’s probably not going to happen. If I don’t put the work in, it’s not going to happen. If I’m not motivated, it’s not going to happen. But ultimately it’s on me. If I act intentionally, typically good things will come my way. Now, the way I get to be pilot and navigator is with the stuff that I spoke about this week, especially yesterday, and asking people who are very successful, maybe even more successful than me about how to achieve certain things. So I get additional insight because I’ll try anything once. I’m not afraid of failure. And if someone comes up with an idea that seems completely out of left field, it might actually be the gem of gold that I’m looking for and what it cost me, $200 bottle of Joseph Phelps Insignia wine or whatever it might be, that could end up meaning a couple hundred thousand dollars to me over the years. You see? So again, you get what
You pay for, you get people to appreciate you. It also keeps you in a good mindset that you’re absolutely in control, and there is no chance in me becoming a victim. I think it was George Bernard Shaw who said, successful people look for the right circumstances, forgetting in what they want in life, forgetting what they want in their life, and if they can’t find them, they create ’em. So this would be very, very empowering for you. You can do it. Someone had to think about an online marketplace in an ideation that we now know as Amazon. Then they had to go fill in the pieces, right? Didn’t it start as an online bookstore or something like that? I remember watching Amazon and books, A million come up around a similar time, so I might be a little bit off, but again, it starts with the idea and then it was the evolution.
And so as far as I’m concerned, if we’re not evolving, it’s not like we’re dying, but there is a stagnation. So I always like to have some goals. I went to that art class on Thursday nights. It’s a graduate class and some very, very talented people who do things very, very differently from me. And at first blush, it’s a little intimidating. Some of these people are doing portraits. They look like Rembrandts stuff from the Renaissance period. It’s almost like they took a four K camera and took a picture. And I’m like, I don’t even know how long it take you to do that. And one of the young women said, oh, it took me about three, four weeks. And I was like, wow, that’s pretty remarkable to have that much detail with a brush, an oil paint. It’s quite remarkable. So we started sharing ideas and she’d look at some of my stuff and said, I’m very intimidated by your stuff.
It seems very aggressive and very, the term she used was B D E, which I’m not going to discuss here. It was a bigger canvas, it seemed. The gestural marks were kind of aggressive and it was very, very different. So we could learn from one another. And so I’m going to try my hand at doing things very, very differently just as an exercise, just to grow my brain. And we’re going to share some ideas. We actually did an exercise in class where she put up three pieces of her work. I put up three of mine, and we each picked one, and we tried to paint in each other’s style, talk about grabbing a brick. It was very intimidating, and I was probably the oldest one there. I mean, I was invited in as a guest. It’s a graduate course, but these people have serious chops sitting there. I’m not a big brush guy. I’m mostly pallet knives and oil sticks, which I do kind of by hand. So a brush doesn’t feel natural in my hand as trying to move color on canvas or make gestural marks. And so I’m like, okay, if that’s the weakest link in my game, I can either continue to say that out loud and own it, or I can actually try and
Practice it and make a change. Whether or not it makes a difference isn’t necessarily important. It’s that I get to grow as a person. You see, I’m challenging myself with something that seems very foreign. It seems a little intimidating. Of course, there’s not really any money on the line, but I’m always interested in going after the things that feel weird and feel awkward. Then everyone’s looking at the work and they’re looking at the original and they’re like, that’s what you think this looks like. You know what I’m saying? So it’s intimidating in its own way. The same way you might feel if you’re talking to a very well established trader about your trading style, same energy. Doesn’t matter how we get to the feeling, the feeling is the same, and we can share that feeling, right? That’s how we can connect with one another. So when you think about life in those terms, it’s true for your personal life.
It’s one of the reasons why I think folks who do some of the one-on-one stuff, they feel like not only did their trading improve, but their lives improved. Why is because we apply the same technology to the things in your life that are important, as is your trading. And all of a sudden everything gets better. And a big part of that is ownership. And I like to say that to myself a lot. And I’m driving in the car, things aren’t going my way. I’m like, look, throw, don’t start pouting about stuff. Doesn’t get you anywhere. Stay in the solution. How can you try things differently? Who can you email? Who can you call? What’s another way? Because life is probabilistic. What’s another possible outcome of this? What’s another approach to help you get to the same point B? So I constantly say in the solution, knowing that there might be five or six attempts at something that don’t work out.
Either they need more time or there was just no interest or it never got any lift. But the main thing is that I say like, okay, I’m still the pilot and the navigator. I need to ideate more, meditate more. Maybe pick up the phone and ask people what they think and then just keep moving forward. The key part to the success though is the ownership and knowing that you’re actually in control, even though you feel like you’re out of control, even when you don’t have any evidence that what you’re working on is coming to fruition, I promise you, if you keep taking the steps sooner or later, you’re going to start panning for gold and you’re going to see some gold flakes in the bottom of your pan. So stick with that and evolve it further. Then that when that stalls, you can pivot and use that as a resource and then build upon it. Now you’re onto step two. You didn’t even know it, but it’s about ownership and it’s about saying, I own the process. For better or for worse, I own the process and the results are going to come from my sweat equity. I am going to write up the flight plan and then I’m going to steer the ship. Anyway, I hope that helps. I hope you have a great weekend. I’ll let you know how things go with Sean next week, and I will see you Monday. Take care.
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