02 Sep Goal to become a successful trader

Changing (improving) my goal

Become a suc­cess­ful trader

When I decid­ed I was going to become a suc­cess­ful trad­er I made my goal just that: ‘to become a suc­cess­ful trad­er’. Usu­al­ly, we think that by set­ting a goal we need to have the end result in mind. Wan­na get rich? Your end goals is that car or house or what­ev­er it might be. Wan­na lose weight? Your end goal is to have that ath­let­ic physique or final­ly ask­ing that per­son you like out. Unless you are head over heels in love with that per­son the image of you final­ly ask­ing him/her out is not going to linger in your mind for too long. Maybe it is for you, but it’s sure as hell not for me. 

‘Short-term goals’

In the moment when we set a goal we are all for it and are extreme­ly pos­i­tive. We set goals. Even make a plan to go towards it per­haps (if we’re doing it right). But then that feel­ing that we had when com­ing up with the goals dis­ap­pears and we for­get about it all togeth­er (or frankly, we choose to for­get about it). The plan nev­er gets put into action or we do actu­al­ly muster the con­fi­dence to get start­ed only to soon there­after quit. I have had this mind­set for about as long as I can remem­ber. Till one day… 

Dif­fer­ent mindset

I had done the goal set­ting and plan-mak­ing and knew the steps I had to take to get clos­er to my goal. Then I realised that in order to get to clos­er to my goal, I would make a lot of mis­takes. Mis­takes, that more than not for most, are per­ceived very neg­a­tive­ly and makes us quit. Since I didn’t want to bur­den myself with a future prospect of just mak­ing mis­takes and then giv­ing up I decid­ed to approach it in a bit of a dif­fer­ent manner.

Edi­son

Wasn’t it Edi­son that said that he found 10.000 ways of how not to build a light­bulb? Or was it a thou­sand? Who cares. You get the point. This is the same prin­ci­pal. Instead of try­ing to keep that image in your brain alive with what your ulti­mate end-result might be, try to focus on find­ing ways to fail. Find­ing ways to make mis­takes. That’s what I am doing. I am find­ing every pos­si­ble way to fail at trad­ing. Know­ing damn-well that in the process, I’ll be learn­ing what I need to know about trad­ing. With that knowl­edge I’ll make bet­ter edu­cat­ed deci­sions on what to fail on next. And so forth… This to me makes it eas­i­er and more accept­able to make mis­takes. Do what­ev­er works for you.

My goal

So my goal went from ‘To become a suc­cess­ful trad­er’ to ‘Fail till you suc­ceed as a trad­er’’. My goal is to keep try­ing things to find out what does NOT work so I can get clos­er to that what does work. This blog web­site is my tes­ta­ment to just that.

Thank you for reading

Let me know in the com­ments what your goals are and how you set them. How far are you in reach­ing your goals? Have any­thing else to men­tion or just to say hi. Please leave a com­ment below or email me.