Today has been a morning of gratitude for me.
I have a men’s meditation meeting on Sundays that I go to in a nearby church. It is extremely helpful for reframing myself to be appreciative of everything I have in my life. I hear people voice their fears and worries, real concerns about financial security or the ability to take care of their loved ones. Dealing with medical issues personally or for people they are responsible for. People have tough lives.
I am privileged to live a life insulated from almost all of the fears that I hear discussed.
It has become overwhelmingly clear to me as I draw down further that I am protected from my losses. Enduring this drawdown has caused factually zero change in my quality of life. It is entirely in my own head.
For the past decade I have had a mental graph dictating that at X age, I should have Y networth. It’s been internalized in me and has guided my sprints and siestas. Given the life restart I have undertaken in the past 12 months and the roughly 75% drawdown from peak I have experienced for my networth as a whole while leaving business & gambling and transitioning to trading, I think this internal barometer deserves to be reworked.
My financial progress will proceed loosely according to the quantity and quality of my inputs.
I have confidence that I will be able to be where I want to be 1000 days from now when I am 35 — Mentally healthy, in peak physical shape, a millionaire, and with a woman that loves me. Those four goals drive me every day. They are at the core of how I rise before 5am without an alarm and put in long hours every day.
The title of this post spoke to me when I saw it in my feed. I have been collecting quotes over the past months that have helped me to emotionally stabilize myself. For today’s post I’ll give you guys a dump of the ones that I have logged in my journal. I hope you get as much out of them as I have.
“It may seem difficult at first, but all things are difficult at first.” – Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings
“It’s not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.” – Edmund Hillary
“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you have now was once among the things you only hoped for.” – Epicurus
“Discipline is just remembering who you said you wanted to be.”
“Either increase sacrifice or reduce desire.”
“There is little, if anything, redeeming about a porn addict trying to balance the unlimited novelty of digital porn.”
“Whatever moral rules you have deliberately proposed to yourself, abide by them as they were laws … How long then, will you put off thinking yourself worthy of the highest improvements.” – Epictetus
“It’s not necessary to hope in order to persevere.”
“We become what we think about.”
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.” – Carl Jung
“How many times a day do you break your own word?“
“Chin up, size down.”
“Your ceiling is not my ceiling.”
“Cut from their cloth.”
“To be tired from the thing that you once dreamt of doing is a beautiful blessing.”
“You sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one, you felt that you were destined for other things but you had no idea how to achieve them and in your misery you began to hate everything around you.”
“Markets are opportunity generating machines.”
“Anxiety is what happens when your brains are bigger than your balls.”
“The tree that would grow to heaven must send its roots to hell.”
These all have related to different parts of my personal and professional transition.
There is a life motif that I think of often. I think of it as my Shadow. The Shadow that follows me throughout all of my waking hours. It represents the person that I COULD be if I lived that day the way that I “ought” to. It represents the apex of the individual that I could become, that I could live my life as.
Effectively it sets you up for failure. You will always fall short of this perfect concept of yourself.
So in that way, it’s not helpful to feel enslaved to it.
It does however help me as whatever depiction of this ideal Shadow self that comes to mind represents the highest usage of my time in that moment or on that day. Not just your present self image, but your perfect self image is constantly evolving. I reflect on it often. I used to feel strong feelings of inferiority when thinking about how badly I was failing myself by making choices I wasn’t proud of, or having my efforts and inputs fall short of what I knew I was capable of.
Over the past year I have become meaningfully closer to having my lived decisions and thoughts mirror my Shadow. It’s something that I take immense satisfaction in. It feels so good to live up to your expectations. Sometimes I go to sleep feeling truly satisfied. Occasionally the calendar that I fill in everyday will have “Well Done” in that day, rather than the laundry list of items I wanted to tick off. Those are the great days. The days where you know that you woke up and lived your life as you ought to have.
Where you didn’t fail yourself by falling short. You lived a 90%+ fidelity to your ideal self image.
What a rush.
My objective through the end of April is that for the trading days of March 30 & 31, April 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 27, 28, 29, and 30, I will get be at my desk 530a-130p engaged with the markets. I will be in control of my trading decisions and make intentional, reasoned entries and exits. I’ll avoid the trading sins that I have collected and refine the definition and execution of my playbook. I’ll trade consistently with a maximum position size of $1.5k per symbol. I will only raise that position size after two consecutive green weeks. I’ll be diligent about my after hours study and review, working to constantly elevate my game. I’ll live a healthy life in terms of diet, sleep, habits, exercise and social so that I can bring my best version of myself to compete each day.
I don’t expect to draw down another 60k before profitability. In fact I think it is just around the corner, I can feel it. But I have been thoroughly humbled about trading unjustifiably large size and my eventual increases will be duly earned.
I forgot to mention my favorite quote: “The market is a mirror.”
I feel this so strongly. All my inadequacies are instantly revealed when put under the magnifying glass of the market. Anxiety, fear, risk aversion, poor emotional control, different kinds of tilt, myopic profit taking, FOMO, irrational clicking in, etc etc etc. All of these mental impurities are on full display when meeting the unfeeling feedback of the market.
It has helped me become a better human to be humbled in this way.
It also motivates me to bring the best version of myself to the markets each day.
I know that this will pay off, not just financially, but for my self respect and the version of myself I bring to meet the world.
OTN.