Podcast – Episode 36 – Lean In
Podcast Transcript
Genius nation, it’s time for you to lean in. That’s right. I said it’s time for you to lean in. Recently I was interviewed on the Live Your Passion podcast. It was a lot of fun. It was fun we talked about a couple of things especially about how I live my passion and how I discovered my passion and all that. But when I was telling my story and I was doing the interview, I shared that when I got started in trading I had a really, really rough time.
And while I was learning I’ll be kept to learn something right there, the story was basically I was working and I had always wanted to be a trader, so I was learning how to trade in my off hours. So I’d come home from work. We didn’t have any kids at the time and I would spend some time learning and testing and putting on trades and whatnot. But as you can imagine I wasn’t that serious at it. It was a part time thing. I was tired after work. I wanted to spend time with my wife, all this stuff. So I mean, I was what you call it was a hobby. It wasn’t serious. It was a busy as a hobby, but I had always wanted it to be serious. I wanted that to be my livelihood and I wanted to leave the job.
I loved the job, but I wanted to leave the job and do this on my own and I wanted it to be my own boss. Well, I got my wish and I got laid off from the position. In fact the whole company was shut down. But the thing was that now I have no job and I really was not the most horrible employee. Right. I don’t want to go into too many details, but it wasn’t gonna be that easy for me to find a position like the one I had left. It was a very good position. They gave me a lot of freedoms. They were paying me well. They treated me with a lot of respect. I knew that finding something like that again would be extremely, extremely difficult. And so I could go back into the workforce and look for something else or the other option was that may be I try to become a full time trader, which was the ultimate goal.
Right. So now my safety net has been taken away, but really it’s all my obstacles have been taken away because I have all the time in the world now. So I discussed it with my wife and she’s always been very supportive of everything I’ve done. And so I did it. I went into trading full time and it was a huge risk, but I was young and if it didn’t work out, I could have gotten a job, could go back up there. Plus to help out my wife decided that she was going to start working two jobs to support us so that I wouldn’t have that pressure of having to make it work my trading right away so that I have to take money out of my trading account for us to pay the bills. So she went and she got a second job and she was a nurse at the time, so it was very easy for her to do that.
But it was very tiring mentally, physically on her, bless her heart. You fast-forward a few months and I was actually keeping my wife in the dark, but how I was doing because I was not doing well. And I was doing everything I could. It was reading books and watching news and trying to follow any strategy I can come up with anything that looked good, any email that I got, I would open and investigate it. I went to, I don’t know how many, dozens and dozens or hundreds of webinars, trying to pick up little tidbits here and there trying to read blog posts and watch TVs and buy videos and go to the library and read books and everything I could do to get better. But then there was that one day when my wife came home and she checked the mail, she brought her home and she opened my most recent account statement and she saw that I had already lost in just a few months over $48,000. Needless to say, she was not a happy camper.
And so I mean, that kind of impacted us for a while and it was decision time again. Right? So it’s like, okay we decided you would do this, you would try it. It’s not going very well. I don’t know how he could get any worse. So you haven’t lost all the money yet. But if you keep going, that’s the track that it looks like we’re going.
So may be my wife was losing faith in me. I had already lost a lot of money. She’s probably thinking, she never mentioned it, but she’s probably was thinking that why she ever married me in the first place and I wasn’t really sure what I was doing? I mean, I was doing everything that was told to do everything I was following every strategy I could find. I was reading everything. I could do testing everything, but I felt like I was making one step forward three steps back and I wonder how many of you guys are out there feeling the same thing? I mean you try trying, you’re trying to and it works for a little bit. Then you lose and then it works a little bit and then boom, the market drops. You’re not even back to square one.
You’re like negative, right? So you never get into the goal, you just going backwards. But I really, really, really, really, really did not want to go back to work. And so I kind of went all in. I made that just like, no, I’m going to do this. I don’t care what’s going to happen. I am going to go for broke. I am all in, literally put all my chips on the table. If I don’t do this, I am going to literally be broke with the zero in my account. Luckily for me, I found selling options and that was my saving grace and overtime I was able to figure it out and the rest is history. But what would have happened if I had given up if I’d gone back to the workforce, played it safe, try to be average not try to rock the boat.
What would have happened? I mean, I don’t know, but I do know that I would not be anywhere near as happy and as fulfilled as I am now. I would probably wouldn’t be talking to you right now. You wouldn’t be listening to this for sure. I wouldn’t be living the passive trading lifestyle. I wouldn’t be able to help as many people that have helped. And I probably would still be thinking and wondering and having doubts, lingering thoughts like, Oh man, what if, what if I had done that path? What if I had gone down that road the road less traveled as they say. My point is that in trading and in life, nothing comes easy. It’s easy to give up. It’s easy to blame other people or other systems or the markets.
It’s hard to go the extra mile and I think that is why most traders lose money. Not because you’re stupid, but because they give up, they give in, they quit, they stop three feet from gold, okay? And in his all time. Classic book, Think and Grow Rich. Napoleon Hill tells the story of a guy named R.U. Darby. Darby’s uncle had gold fever. Now this is years ago when they were still finding for gold, but Darby’s uncle had gold fever. So he staked his claim and he started digging right. After a lot of hard work, the uncle found a vein of ore, so he covered up his find and you returned home to raise the money that he needed for all the machinery that he would need to bring that ore to the surface to actually mine all that gold. They raise the money, and Darby traveled with his uncle back to their site to make their fortune, right.
And things started great. And before long they had enough money and enough ore and enough gold to pay off all their debts, which was awesome. And they were super excited because everything from then on would be profit, right? And everything was looking good, but then all of a sudden the ore dried up, there was no more gold. It just disappeared. So they’re like, what happened? There should be a lot more gold here. This can’t be it. This is not fair. We found it, we did all this work, we found it, but all we got was enough to pay off our debts. So they kept on digging. They kept trying, they looked around, they kept whatever they could come up with, they tried. But after a while they threw in the towel, they’re like, this is not meant to be, we’re not meant to have this success.
And so they quit in frustration. They sold all their machinery and they sold it all to a junk guy. One of those guys, he just buys stuff people at rock bottom prices and hopefully he can sell it back to more gold diggers later on for. So they sold everything they had for a few hundred bucks. They should go. They travel home and they’re totally disappointed. They don’t know what to do now. Now that junk guy, he didn’t know anything about gold, but he had seen all about gold people coming in and leaving and getting frustrated. But he saw that these guys had some success so he went and he called in an expert, a mining expert and he paid him to go to that site and assess the site and try to see if there was any more gold there or not. And there was. That guy, that mining expert did his reports and surveys and whatever, and he found that there was gold just three feet away from where Darby and his uncle had stopped digging. Literally three feet away. That junk man, he already had the equipment, he already had everything. He went on to make millions from the mine.
Can you believe it? Darby found out about this. And they paid back everybody that led them money, but he was determined that, hey, I’m going to learn from this mistake, my mistake of giving up too soon. And he did learn because then he went on into insurance sales and he became one of the most successful life insurance agents in the country.
And he made a lot more money from doing that then from the gold mine. But he learned the lesson that you need to persevere through difficulties and stay focused if you are going to be successful. I mean, this is a true story, right? And you can look it up, three feet from gold after all that time, all that planning, all that dreaming, right? It’s crazy. I mean, take a look at all the things you cherish in your life right now. Your kids, your grandkids, your spouse, your boat, whatever, whatever you cherish. Think about it.
Was it easy to attain? I mean, kids are not easy. They are not right. When they’re little, they’re hard as hell and they become teenagers they get worse. Grand kids, okay, grand kids are easy because you don’t have to anything, but you have to have the kids first, right? You got to raise the kids until you get the great kid. So I don’t know about that one. In marriage, marriage not easy. You want to have a good marriage you’re going to have ups and downs. Everything in life. You’re gonna have ups and downs. It’s the things that we fight the hardest for the hardest to get that we cherish the most. Right? So anything in your life that you cherish, did it come easy? No, no way, right? We all have our ups and downs, but when we know what we want and we stick with it, the results come.
So I want you to lean in to trading, okay? I don’t want you to go all in like I did. I don’t want you to bet the farm. That’s crazy. And if I was advising myself when I was still young I would told my self the same think Hey you are freaking crazy. Luckily it worked out for me, but I want you to lean in. I want you to double down, make a commitment that if trading is what you want to do, that you will stick with it because if others can do it, I mean, so can you. But you need to lean in. right?
You need to track your progress. You need to learn, you need to get help if you need it. And Tony Robbins he says that the way to mastery is constant and never ending improvement as one part of it. And the second part of it is massive action and that’s the secret, action. The more, the better. And then constantly tracking what you’re doing and improving, tweaking and working on it because you can’t do the same thing over and over again and having lousy results. You gotta improve, you gotta figure out, Hey, what’s going on wrong? How can I improve this? Simplify whatever you’re doing, cut out all the noise. If you’re getting all these emails, hundreds of emails a day talking about this trading program or that trading program. Get rid of that stuff. Pick the one that makes the most sense to you. Focus on it, track it, improve it, get help.
If there’s somebody doing something that is successful at what you want to be doing, find out what they’re doing and emulate them, copy them, model them, whatever the words you choose, just do what you’re doing right? And then once you start getting successful, once you start getting consistent, then you can tweak it. Then you can change it and you can say you know what? This is taking a little bit more risk than I want to take. Let me scale it back. But you don’t do that until it’s working.
Does that make sense? Be Consistent first, then start to change it and model it, and then it’ll take off for you. When you’re in the beginning and you’re just trying to be consistent. I’m not telling you that you got to make hundreds of thousands of dollars right away. All I want you to do is not to lose money. To me, that’s consistent. Even if you’re not making any money, I don’t care, but month after month after month, if you are not losing money, that’s wonderful. That is a grand slam. That is let’s have a party because once you get to that point, then we can tweak it and then we can say, okay, what exactly are you doing? And there’s just a couple little levers that we can pull that can start getting your profits and awesome results. And then from there you’re off to the races.
So it doesn’t matter where you are now. Does it matter how long you’ve been at trading? Doesn’t matter what type of trading you’ve done. Lean in make this year the best year ever, commit how much time am I going to put into this? How much effort am I going to put into this? The more you do, the more action you take, the better off you’re going to be, the better results you’ll be. Okay. And if you hit a wall, reach out, reach out to us, reach out to somebody else that knows what they’re doing. Reach out to somebody who’s done it before. Find somebody to help you and just get it done, right? If anything I’m here, and I’m living proof that it’s possible. And so reach out and remember, keep the odds in your favor. Take care.
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