The Secret Weapon for WEALTH, HEALTH, RELATIONSHIPS and HAPPINESS
“Sometimes you’re just too close to something to see it clearly. It’s like you’re trying to gauge the room with your face pressed to the wall, you just can tell what’s going on“
When we buy into the need for short term results, what we’re really doing is investing into long term pain. We struggle with staying on track with anything long enough to see real lasting progress.
We often get discouraged when improvement slows or we begin to regress.
The things we want don’t come quick enough or fast enough, and it often leads to us quitting out of aggravation or coming up with excuses as to why we should change what we’re doing, or do something different.
Stupidly, we often blame giving up, on external circumstances or events. The things we cannot control, and on the outside of us.
What I’ve learned though, is that setbacks, roadblocks, surprises and a temporary loss of discipline can all be overcome by a little shift in perspective and not much more.
I’ve also learned that all of these things are normal and expected, if you are striving to do anything difficult, but especially if you are trying to build the “Trading account” that you aspire to have.
We understand the world around us, and what is happening based on our perception. In other words, our perception or how we see and define things, is constantly creating our reality.
If you’re someone who tends to give up too soon, struggle to finish what you start, barely miss reaching your goals, find it hard to keep going, lose motivation easily, or you get frustrated by slow progress, I want to show you a way of looking at things that can turn your situation around completely, because that’s what it did for me.
We were Taught the WRONG thing!
Somewhere somehow we were taught that progress should come in regular intervals and in equal amounts. That we move towards our goals in a straight line. That one unit of effort will give us a certain amount of results, and therefore two units of effort will give us exactly twice that result and so on.
In our minds, a chart of our progress should look something like this. As we try to get better, more consistent, more profitable or just more calm while we trade, we expect to see regular progress and results week after week.
But we don’t, and when we don’t we feel aggravated and beaten down. Most of all we get disappointed.
Guess where disappointment comes from? It comes from having improper and inaccurate expectations.
Because we expect our progress to look like this chart, when it doesn’t, we feel like something is wrong or we messed up somewhere..
You see, progress isn’t just about effort, it also requires discipline. There is no success without discipline. We are not perfect, none of us are, so our discipline comes and goes.
Because discipline is something you have to build over time. The availability of discipline is not something that God gave out to some people and not others. Some things are easier for some people to do, but it still takes discipline to do them consistently in order to get better..
Discipline comes from trying over and over long enough. So you don’t start with discipline before you do the thing, you build discipline while you try to do the thing and fail, then try some more.
Sometimes discipline is stronger and other times it’s hard to find at all. I’m not excusing a lack of discipline, I’m just being real, that’s the reality of being human.
Systems help with this, having a process, but in the end, our discipline will come and go, but it doesn’t mean that our progress stops.
The reality is that progress looks something like this….
What we actually experience is a non-linear progression towards our goals. This becomes about the overall “trend” of our progression and not about where we are at any given point relative to any other recent point.
Where are we right now, VS when we started. In simple terms, we assess where we are based on the question: Are we better or are we worse than when we started? Ok well how much better or worse?
Here’s the Real Truth About Progress
When you step back and think about it, this applies to so many things in life, not just Trading and Investing. This path is often the same path we take when: Improving our earning potential, becoming a better parent or spouse, we build skills, building the body we want or we work on ourselves spiritually.
The one area that really drew this to my attention, was the performance of my investments over time.
I love the stock market, I’ve had this obsession with trading for the last fifteen years. I even have a YouTube channel devoted to it, as you well know.
One of the keys to getting better at investing, is to get used to the ups and the downs, and to broaden your perspectives from the short term performance to the long term trends.
The prices of investments in the stock market are dictated by the same forces that cause us to move up and down with our fitness results, finance results, relationships results, you name it. Those forces are driven by human emotion.
Let’s look at some charts, and I want you to substitute or replace, imagine if you will, that the lines on the screen represent your progress towards your goals in any area of your life.
Ok…… again…. the lines on the screen represent your progress towards your goals in any area of your life.
We’ll start by looking at the movement of price (the measure of progress) over a short term of a couple of weeks.
It’s all over the place, but the overall trend is lower. From the left side of the graph, the current price (the measure of progress) is lower than what we see at the start of the graph.
If this represented our progress towards our Trading goals, we’d see no progress over this period of time and suspect that we may have gotten worse. Which we did, but not in any way that matters over the long term, so long as we do something about it and don’t give up.
So long as we do something about it and don’t give up. Do something, that means take action…
Now let’s look at a chart of the exact same investment, but over a period of years. Measuring from where we started (on the left), to where we are now (on the right), you can see a huge amount of upside movement.
That’s the goal, upside movement, and over time, through a series of ups and downs, and periods of sideways, the investment moves upward.
The investment is the exact same in both pictures, but one is viewing the movement of price (the measure of progress) over a time period of a couple weeks, and the other is viewing the movement of price over a decade.
What’s Missing from YOUR Results…
What’s missing from your results, is your ability to stay consistent with your efforts over a longer period of time.
The mental effort stays the same, your mind just is not disciplined enough to focus on what it needs to be focused on, but that can be built over time.
For now during these periods of non-progression, in the absence of discipline you have movement but no real target.
You start doing other activities that don’t contribute to your overall goals and progress, so the discipline to move on the right things is what is necessary to get back in the groove.
This discipline will come and go making our results better or worse in the short term.
But as we improve over time our discipline, through trying, leads to our efforts getting more focused and our results get better.
With consistent effort, as discipline comes and goes, it comes and goes charting higher highs and higher lows (I didn’t mean to rhyme).
This means that if you look at the results from a broader perspective, if you can step back, you will see that progress is indeed being made, and it’s worth continuing the effort.
The thing that you actually need most, is time. Then you need more effort directed at taking more actions.
That is the real message, this is what happens if you try long enough and hard enough.
Take a step back and look at your progress over a longer period of time, it’s the power of perspective, you have to step back to see things more clearly.
One of my favorite quotes about it came from Steven furtick, who grew up in my hometown by the way.
“Your perspective will either become your prison or your passport.”
He means, it is either going to bind you or it is going to set you free.
I like that idea
When you buy into short term results, you are investing in long term pain.
See Yall