Podcast – Episode 33 – How to Stop The Haters
Podcast Transcript
Hey there, Genius Nation, welcome back to another episode of the Option Genius podcast. I wanted to start off by saying, thank you for listening and for making this podcast so successful. I mean, not a day goes by that we don’t get an email or a Facebook message from somebody saying that they heard about us on the podcast and how they like it. And it seems that most of you guys have been binge listening to all these episodes. I had a guy the other day he told me that he had listened to 12 episodes in a row. Like, wow. You listened to my voice for 12 episodes in a row. Man, I hope you’re not deaf. You know?
Not exactly the most melodious voice in the world, but I do appreciate it. I appreciate all the good comments and everything. And in iTunes, there is a way to leave a rating and a review. So I would so appreciate it if you did leave a rating and a review there. Let me know what you like, what you don’t like. If you have any topics you want me to cover you can put those in there as well, just write it in the comments. ‘Cause I do read all of them. I mean I go in periodically and I look at all of them. See how are we doing? What are the people thinking?
And of course we can’t make everybody happy. I mean most of the reviews are good, but there was one that I wanted to share. And you’ll see it if you check out the reviews, okay. There’s somebody with the name of Tom S. I don’t know if this is a competitor or real person or whatnot, but Tom S. wrote that he had old shoes with more experience than I did. That was his actual comment. That the podcast sucked because I lacked experience.
Well, I mean I have been trading options for a living for over a decade. Option Genius itself, the company, turns 10 years old in February. So if that’s experience, then I don’t know what it is. And at first the comment made me angry. I read it and I’m like, what the heck is this guy? Who does he think he is? You know? What do you mean I don’t have experience, did you even listen to any of the episodes? Do even know who I am, or what I talk about, or anything? Probably not. And who gave this guy the right to post a comment and say I don’t have any experience and that he has shoes with more experience?
And I steamed about it for a few minutes. But then actually I kept thinking about it, and kept thinking about it. And then I started laughing. Because I gotta admit, the comment is funny, right? I mean I liked to meet his shoes someday. Maybe they can teach me a thing or two about trading, right? And eventually, I let the comment roll off my back. And now it’s like a joke that I tell my friends. And they ask me, hey what do you do? Oh you don’t wanna ask, you know, I trade. But don’t ask me to do it because they got shoes more experienced than me. Right?
Now I wanted to share this with you for two reasons. First of all, is I like you to remind you to please leave a rating and a review. That really beneficial for the podcast. That’s how people find it. The more reviews there are, the better Apple rates us and so the more people will find out about us. So I would really appreciate that.
And two, I bet you that there are people in your life that are trying to get you to give up on your dreams. Aren’t there? Somebody’s skeptical about you trading. Maybe a mother-in-law, or a mother, or a wife, or a husband. Somebody, it doesn’t matter who it is, but their comments hurt. Right? Their comments sting if you listen to them long enough. ‘Cause it makes you lose your confidence in yourself. And for a trader that is killer. If you lose confidence in yourself as a trader, then there’s almost nothing that anybody else can teach you to overcome that. I can give you all the strategies and all the ticks and all the trading plans in the world, but if you lose confidence in yourself, if you don’t think that you can do this, then you can’t.
Okay? I need that to sink in. And I need you to have confidence in yourself and not to listen to those people who are telling you that you cannot do it. Okay? Because anybody on your side, they shouldn’t be telling you that you cannot do it. They might be saying, oh yeah that trading stuff’s not gonna work. Right? I mean at least they should be saying that. But they don’t know what you know. They don’t know what you’re trying to learn, so they don’t really have that knowledge to be able to make an informed decision.
So I don’t think you should be listening to them unless they are sitting right next to you listening to the podcast, listening to the courses, reading all the material you do. And learning and doing all the trades. Okay? Now a big reason that people try to do this, I think is jealousy. They see you doing something to make your life better, and deep down they know that they’re not happy with their lives, but they want their lives to get better too. But they don’t wanna take any action. Because action is hard. Right? Learning how to trade, learning how to sell options, that’s hard. It takes time, it takes effort. People don’t wanna do that.
The average person on the street doesn’t sell options because they are too lazy, maybe is the right word. Or they’re not motivated enough, or whatever. But they don’t wanna take that action. They don’t wanna learn. It’s easier to watch TV. It’s easier to watch Real Housewives or Orange County on TV. Or Maury Povich or Doctor Phil, or any of this other stuff that is like, it just lets you check out mentally so that you don’t have to think about your own life. And think about how things could be better but they’re not because you don’t take any action. Right?
And so if these people see you taking action, and if you succeed, then they’re gonna feel even worse about themselves. And in fact I was just listening to a Tony Robbins cd about this yesterday. And I was talking to my wife about it last night because my wife, thank god she’s amazing. She’s incredible, I mean you talk about superwoman, there’s lots of super women out there, and she’s one of them. I mean she takes care of three young kids, she has her own business that is doing phenomenally well and she only goes to it two days a week, for a few hours a day. She’s making awesome. She’s doing really well. She is an amazing singer and she was an amazing singer before, but now she’s taking singing classes and she’s getting even more better. And so she’s becoming more and more known in our community.
And so more and more people are approaching her and she’s getting more and more chances to sing everywhere. And so her friends are seeing her go further in this way and get better and get more famous. She’s also a teacher at it’s like a Sunday school. So she teaches there and people are knowing her from that. That’s her passion. And now recently she has started going to the gym, she got herself this awesome personal trainer. And she’s going three times a week. And her friends and people in the community are already mentioning how much better she looks. You know? And she’s posting stuff on Facebook, people are like, oh wow what a big transformation. I mean she hasn’t lost that much weight yet, she’s only lost like 10 pounds, but she’s exercising and working out, so that fat is leaving and turning into muscle, which just looks better.
So she’s winning on all fronts. And she’s an amazing wife. She cooks great, she has time for me. I can’t ask for a better partner. And the thing is that she was telling me, that some of her friends, so called friends, are now turning against her and they’re making all these snide comments. They’re talking behind her back, they’re making jokes. And at first you couldn’t understand it, but then we were talking about it and I told her what I heard on the Tony Robbins cd and it’s like, they have this thing in Australia it’s called the Tall Poppy syndrome. Where if somebody gets too big for themselves, they cut off the poppy. You know, I guess it’s like wheat or it grows and if there’s one that’s sticking up taller than the rest it gets cut off.
And we have that in every culture. If somebody is out there legitimately trying to make their life better, the haters will come in and put them down. The haters will tell them that it’s not something that they should be doing, that it’s not possible. Who do they think they are? That sort of thing. And it could be somebody in your family, it could be a relative, it could be a spouse, a child, a friend. Literally you know another thing that Tony Robbins said, and I’ve seen this time and time again, is that you’re income or your emotional stability or anything in your life is going to be the average of the people that you hand out with. Your peer group.
And so if all of a sudden if you’re hanging out with a lot of fat people, right? And if you start working out and going to the gym and going on a diet, you’re gonna make them uncomfortable. Because they don’t wanna be fat, nobody wants to be fat. But they just don’t take action. And eventually either they’re gonna be inspired by you and start doing what you’re doing and raise their standards. Or, you’re gonna lower your standards and give up and just join them. Or, you’re gonna lose them as friends. And that’s just the way it happens.
So the same thing with if you hand out with a bunch of people that drink. And if you’re the only person that doesn’t drink, well eventually you’re gonna get kicked out of the group. That’s just the way it happens. So you see when somebody is saying negative things about you, those comments are not really about you. They are a defense mechanism. And we all have it, we all do it. We need to do it less. We need to learn to do it less, to support the people that we love. Okay?
Now there are those people that do do it out of love. They try to protect you, they try to save you. Right? They have a certain set of experiences and priorities and when what you do does not line up with their priorities, they get angry and frustrated at you. Right? So if you’re trying to do something new, you’re trying to spend time on a course and learning, and your partner or your significant other or your friend thinks that that’s not a priority, that something else should be a priority and your priority and their priority is not matching, then they’re gonna get upset.
Now of course, they’re not gonna see it that way. They’re gonna think that they’re doing it. Right? That you’re doing something wrong, that you need to go with what they’re doing. So for example, your dad is not gonna realize that just because he lost money 20 years ago when he tried to trade futures, does not mean that you’re gonna lose money when you’re trading options. But if he thinks so, he’s gonna try to talk you out of it. And that’s exactly what happened to me. My first experience in trading was in futures. And I don’t know how it happened, but I was doing all kinds of different things, I was in between high school and college, somewhere around that time. And I was trying to do different things to earn money. And I was on all these mailing lists. And I would get all these pitches in the mail, oh here’s this course. Oh here’s this make money at home thing. And network marketing thing and MLM and all this stuff.
So there was one course I got, it was a sales letter for a course on how to trade futures. And it made it seem so simple. So I had a little bit of money, I put my credit card, I bought I course and it was like, wow this thing is so awesome. This is so easy. But I didn’t have any money, so I shared it with my dad. I’m like, dad dad look at this, this is so easy I can do this, I can do this. I know I can do this. I’m gonna do this, this is my thing, I know this is gonna be my calling. I’m gonna be a trader. And even though I never traded but I was like, yeah I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna be a trader.
And so what he did was amazing. And I owe him a lot for doing this. He didn’t have the money either, but he borrowed $8,000 from a credit card, at some crazy interest rate, like 21, 22% because it was a cash advance, right? And we opened a trading account with that $8,000. Now I wasn’t supposed to use the whole $8,000 and of course you know you can’t put all your money in one trade. And so it took a while to open the account and all that, and get the money in there. So I was doing everything the course taught me to do. I was listening, they had some phone you could call in and listen to their recorded messages every two weeks or something. So I would do that. I ordered charts because at that time, this was the early … When was this?
This was like mid 1990s, so I had to order the charts by mail. They came on paper on these really big paper, so you’d get new charts every week for the different commodities so you’d have to draw them for the week until you got the new one next week. Paid money for that. And I was charting every day, checking everything. Ah man, I was ready to go. I had the perfect trade on the Japanese Yen. Japanese Yen was going up, it was a commodity, it was awesome. I couldn’t sleep at night because I knew how much money I was gonna make because the trend was there. I was plotting it, I knew exactly where I needed to put my order entry and where to put my stop loss, all that. And as soon as that account was ready to go, as soon as that money hit the account and I could trade, I put on my first trade.
Boom. Buy, one contract of the Japanese Yen. Set my stop loss, boom. All right now all I gotta do is sit back and make money. Hoo yeah. The next morning I wake up and I go to work, I go to the office and I check my account. And my account should have $8,000 plus whatever money I made on that day, right? On the Japanese Yen. But my account only has like $43 in it or some crazy small number. I don’t know the exact number. But some ridiculously small amount. And I was going nuts. What happened? Where’s my money?
You know I looked at my trade, I looked at my account and there was no trade there. The Japanese Yen account, the Japanese Future was gone. I’m like, what happened? Where’d it go? What? You know? And I wasn’t an expert at it, and it was my first trade and I didn’t really know everything. And so I went in and I looked at it, and I figured out finally that I bought the futures contract the day before. In the morning, the Japanese contract opened down, and it opened well below where I put my stop loss. And so as soon as it started trading, my stop loss order was executed and I was sold out of my position all the way at the very bottom. Which happened to be the low of the day. And for the next several days, the Japanese Yen just went higher and higher and higher and higher, and there was nothing I could do about it.
I lost the entire $8,000 in one day. In one single trade. Even though I had everything perfect. Like except for the stop loss. I mean I had to place a stop loss, right? You can’t be unprotected. But the fact that it opened so low, below the stop loss, kicked me out and it was over. And so once that was all done with, my dad could’ve come and been sad about it. But he was actually happy. I’m like, what are you happy about? He goes, I did this to teach you a lesson. And I’m like, what are you talking about? What kind of lesson could you be teaching me?
He goes, I don’t want you to be trading futures. I don’t want you to be trading at all. I’m like, what? Well that doesn’t make any sense, why’d you give me $8,000? He goes, because I knew you were gonna lose the money. I wanted to give you the money, and I wanted you to lose the money so that you would know how bad it feels to lose this money. So that you would realize that it’s not that easy and that you cannot make money trading, and that you don’t trade again. I wanted this bug, you were bitten by this trading bug, I wanted that bug out of your life. And I don’t want you to lose money ever again on trading. So we lost the $8,000. But it’s a very good lesson for you for the rest of your life.
And I was furious. I’m like, wait a minute. You gave me enough rope to hang myself, and you didn’t help me, and you just wanted me to hang myself. And you didn’t have enough confidence in me to know that I could do this. And I had other issues with my dad too, but he thought he was doing the right thing. You know? He thought he was doing the best. He thought he was trying to help me. Guess what happens when … What do we do with that? We have to deal with it. Right? We have to deal with it. We have to deal with these haters. We have to deal with the people who think that they’re trying to teach us a lesson.
And the best way to get them to stop, and by the way some of them never stop. But the best way to get them to stop, is to succeed. To succeed as a trader and to show them in their face, look I did it. Even though you thought I couldn’t. Even though you said I couldn’t. I did it. And that is the ultimate vindication. So stop listening to the haters. The negative Nancies. Make your goals, keep learning, keep trading, keep getting better and you will get there.
Because as somebody who lost $8,000 on his first trade, but now makes that all the time. I can tell you, that you can do it. If I can do it, if the hundreds of people that we have helped do it, can do it. And if the thousands and tens of thousands of others who trade options can do it, then you can. There is no reason that you can’t. There is nothing holding you back, not even a lack of money.
I did another episode about that, episode 27 where I go deeper. If you don’t have money money, that episode, listen to that one. It’ll tell you exactly how to get the money, what to do so that you can trade even without any money. But money is everywhere. If you have the skill, people will pay you. If you can make money, people will throw money at you. So that is not an excuse. Okay? That is not an excuse. Or maybe you have some physical problems, maybe that’s your excuse.
Oh I got headaches or I got back issues. Or whatever. The older I get, the more I realize that everybody has physical problems. Everybody does. You can’t sit for too long ’cause your back hurts, okay. Can’t walk ’cause your knees hurt. Okay. Can’t use the computers too long ’cause your eyes hurt. No problem. I am not trying to berate your issue, I am sure it is painful and annoying and real. But I have seen others with huge disadvantages overcome those disadvantages. And when they had a big enough reason, when they had a big enough why.
You have to find your why. You have to find your reason that you must succeed. Not, “maybe”. Not, “I’ll give this a try”. No, you must succeed. And then everything else goes away. All the excuses just fall apart. All the haters go away because they see you succeeding. And that is why I love selling options. Because no matter what your issue, they are accommodating. You don’t need to sit in front of the screen for long. You don’t need to be the smartest tool in the tool shed. You don’t need to have super quick reflexes, clicking on the mouse a thousand times a day. Just follow the simple formula and it works. Be smart, have a plan, and stick to it.
Okay? Good. Now go do it. And trade with the odds in your favor.
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