Yo. Yo, yo, what do you know? Happy Thursday, folks. So today I want to continue the conversation about environment and talk about the two environments that you have. You have an outside environment, which we touched upon Tuesday, but we also have the internal environment. I mentioned that one thing that you can do is eliminate the noise literally and figuratively from that of which you can see or that you can hear, but also it’s also your consciousness and what’s your self-talk like? How do you speak to yourself when you’re talking to yourself through your conscious, your conscience, right? And my self-talk is actually very, very strong. I didn’t know it when I was starting out. I was also very hard on myself, perhaps like you are too, because I wanted good things for myself and I didn’t know how to calibrate how quickly I should be achieving success for the work that I was putting in.
I thought it would be much more immediate. That seems like it’s a typical guy thing. So I don’t think that I’m terribly unique in that regard. But I’ve come to learn and to understand and hope, share with you here that it’s life on life’s terms. Sometimes it comes in moments and you’ll get some breakthrough and then you’ll plateau, and then things will be like coasting at I’m not making any progress. And then boom, you get a new aha moment and you go up and it looks like your equity curve. So one thing you can work on, aside from building a community of like-minded people who may or may not even be traitors, it doesn’t matter. It’s better if it is. If they are, is what does your internal dialogue look like? And so I was lucky again, and I was born that way, and that I had a strong sense of self.
I could envision a different life than the one I had been born into and one that I wanted to aspire to. And it’s kind of like be, do, have. I had to act apart. You had to take the initiative and behave the way you think that person would behave. And let’s face it, it feels ridiculous a little bit at the beginning. You don’t even know what you’re doing, but what you can say is, if I don’t change, things will be the same tomorrow. That’s guaranteed. Very rarely are you going to just step in shit, and all of a sudden things just happen for you. Can’t happen once in a blue moon. My experience, it happens to the folks who aren’t even necessarily hard chargers, but they’re persistent and they’re relentless. And I’m not talking about going hell bent for election or running at a blue streak. I’m just saying that every day they act intentionally with respect to their goals. A big part of that is what is going on inside between your ears and how do you talk to yourself in those moments when you do have the quiet time? Because you realize that you can’t get good trading ideas off the TV screen during the day.
So I used to write out on index cards, not motivating quotes that was very popular. Read all these books
And find motivational quotes. The thing is, is that if I couldn’t act on them, they seemed empty. They seemed invite, they go, oh, that one’s deep. But that’s usually as far as it goes, and the next day it’s gone. So I would try to think of something that was actionable, right? Something like they say, you are the average of the five people that you spend your time with. And so when I needed, I don’t know if that’s true or not, but it seems to be said, it seems like it’s a reasonable thing to kind of study and it speaks to the episode on Tuesday. And so I would say, okay, if I wanted to reach out to these other people and kind of expand my zone, maybe there’s a 10 year time difference between my, I found myself in that situation a lot where the people that I aspired to be with or emulate were older than me, sometimes a generation older than me.
So what do I do at 24, 25 years of age when I’m calling on a 50 year old? What do you do with that person? So you have to be a little creative. What do they like to do? Do they like to walk a cigar? You can’t do that anymore. Do they like to walk a cigar in Central Park? Do they like to go to, it used to be top of the sixes now. I think it’s like a macado kind of cigar bar at 6 6 6 fifth Avenue across from St. Patrick’s Cathedral, near Rockefeller Center. Do they like to golf? Are they big fans of a sporting team? And so you would say, okay, look, maybe they’re Yankee fans. So then you’d go out and pick up two tickets and say, Hey, I got an extra ticket. You don’t even have to be like, I bought you a ticket.
You get three or four tickets. You have two of your buddies come and you had the extra. And now you start to prospect into that group of people that you want to associate with that can help expand your thinking and help, not necessarily mentor you, but expose you to a different level of success than your peer group is used to. And I used to do that all the time. That’s where all my disposable income kind of went to is not necessarily prospecting these people, but just going out, seeing how they acted, seeing how they behaved, what was their mindset? How did they approach the work week? You know what I mean? And ask them not upfront and overwhelm them like they’re on the marathon, man, is it safe?
What could you do to pick their brain and say, Hey, look, I’m working on this business plan. Can you take a look at it? Sometimes they’d say, no, this was before the age of email. So I’d have to print it out and bind it and say, Hey, here’s a business plan that I’m working on. I was wondering if you just, and I’ll give you 50 bucks, or I’ll take you to dinner and I’ll pick your brain on it. It would be important to me. My peer group, they’re not business owners yet. They haven’t gone out on their own. I don’t really have anyone else to go out to. Now there’s all these mentoring places and score and this and that. It wasn’t really available to me either it didn’t exist or I was ignorant and didn’t know it existed.
So in either way, it wasn’t there. So maybe it’s a round of golf somewhere, or maybe it’s like I used to work at golf courses, so I would say, Hey, Jim McLean is a famous teacher and I can get us on for a lesson on a particular Monday after work. Can you get out a little bit early? I can make that happen. And the guy would be like, wow, you can do that. So I would do that and I’d pay a little cash under the table, this kind of deal. So you can be creative and try to invite those people into your world on the outside, and that affects your inner game. Now that you’ve pulled that off, it should fill you with confidence. It’s not because you landed a million dollar account, but it shows that you can go out, set your mind on doing something, execute it, get it done, and boost your confidence a little bit.
Now those people can also give you some very honest feedback. What I used to hear a lot is like, I’ve never had a person of your age group call me to pick my brain on these types of things. And quite frankly, I’m surprised because I feel successful and I want to give back to the community. So you’d be surprised what people will tell you if you just ask them Right now, I’ve already jumped the gun and I’m doing these damn daily videos to give back to the community for free. We might put a course together on it and take it a step further in the future. I’m talking to Ganja about it, not sure how that would work, but apparently there’s something we can do through YouTube and have a membership aspect to it and turn some of this into a more premium kind of a deal. But that helps your self-talk. It’s like, wow, I called this person. It was intimidating to do so it was effectively, maybe it wasn’t a complete cold call, but I was asking something and I was facing rejection. And so when I found, and this is part of my own self-talk, is the more I put myself in those uncomfortable situations where I had to ask people open-ended questions or yes, no questions where they could say, go forth and procreate with yourself in a manner of speaking.
More times than not, people would say yes in one way, shape, or form. They say, look, I’m awfully busy. I got young kids, or I got crap going on with work, but if you call me Friday at three, I got 15, 20 minutes for you on the phone. And that’s a win. It goes right to your mental game because now achieving a goal, you’re, excuse me, you’re executing on a task that goes towards your goal and you get some very, very valuable feedback from people like, this idea seems good, but this one’s not practical. You can change this one a little bit. Or Here’s how I would do this one even better. And it’s like, wow. Then what do you do? I don’t know. Send the person a bottle of scotch, send them one of their favorite long filler cigars. I dunno. You can get creative, do something nice, send ’em a bottle of whiskey
Or a bottle of wine, buy ’em a $200 gift certificate at a restaurant that you think is good. Say, Hey, thanks. I appreciate the effort. It means a lot to me, more than wanted to send you a little something. That stuff goes a long way people remember, and that’s a very Mike Martin way of going about stuff. The Trading Tribe was a little bit different. I lived in Los Angeles, I had to fly on a plane. That was obviously a huge commitment. So that’s kind of how I paid my tuition on some level, is making a gigantic effort to be part of that. And it’s not a subway train. A few stops down on the four train. It was a much more intense deal. Plus there was time away from the desk and the markets. So this is something that you can think about. I think it’s super valuable.
Anything that you can do to improve your sense of self-awareness, your self-confidence, it goes right into your inner dialogue and your inner chatter. And that’s something that you can focus on and you get to do so by asking people for help. Because more times than not, I mean, heck, I get emails all the time from people, what do you think of this? And sometimes I’ll say, Hey, it doesn’t matter. Here’s where I would go do further research. Or Here’s what I know in my own experience, it takes me five minutes not even to respond politely to an email, especially the ones that are clear and concise. I don’t want four paragraphs that are all blurred into one. It’s T L D R. I don’t have the time for that. I don’t need the context to just the question and then I can help. So think about that on how you can improve that in your own life.
Even here, I don’t really have time to go out because I’m busy, but if you send over an email, I’m absolutely happy to respond, point you in the right direction for this moment in time. I am looking forward to, I got a few friends coming into town this weekend. I’m going to see ’em and spend some time with them too. They’re very, very successful. And that’s all good. So that’s all I have for you today, folks. I appreciate you very much being in here. Please like and subscribe. Also, I should say this at the top of the thing, at the top of the show, but forever in a day, I’ve been given away the audiobook version of the Inner Voice Trading, which I own the rights to. So if you go to martin chronicle.com proper, look in the top right corner and you’ll see a link where you can go and get the download for the audiobook version of the Inner Voice or trading. Thanks so much for being here, folks. I’ll see you tomorrow.
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