What Kind Of Boxer Are You?
"But what is philosophy? Doesn't it simply mean preparing ourselves for what may come? Don't you understand that really amounts to saying that if I would so prepare myself to endure, then let anything happen that will? Otherwise, it would be like the boxer exiting the ring because he took some punches. Actually, you can leave the boxing ring without consequence, but what advantage would come from abandoning the pursuit of wisdom? So, what should each of us say to every trial we face? This is what I've trained for, for this my discipline!"
— Epictetus, Discourses
Today's meditation got me thinking and when we look at it from a trading perspective, there is a lot in common!
When we start out on our trader journey, we will have set backs just as boxers can be knocked down in the ring! However, over a period of time we will start to become more street wise and battle hardened as we learn from those mistakes and start to put strategies in place, to minimise the damage that can be done to us as traders.
As long as we learn from our early trading experiences and mistakes and build on that by putting a set of rules/criteria for our strategies in place, we will be in a much stronger position to succeed, because of the lessons that we have learnt and the structure we have put in place. By sticking totally to the rules/criteria for our strategies and ignoring everything else, we are becoming patient and disciplined.
As we develop/find strategies that work for us, we become more confident and consistent in our trading and things then start to become much clearer as we progress on our trading journey.
If we had never suffered losses in trading, we wouldn't become better traders, so we treat those early losses as our education and use them to avoid making the same mistakes. This will spur us on, as we strive to become better and better traders, practising day in, day out.
To quote from today's meditation; Seneca writes that unbruised prosperity is weak and easy to defeat in the ring, but "a man who has been at constant feud with misfortunes acquires a skin calloused by suffering." This man he says fights all the way to the ground and never gives up.
If we give up at the first sign of defeat and before we have properly learnt our craft, we will never know if we could have succeeded as traders. The only way to find out if we can succeed as traders, is to learn from our mistakes, make sure we don't repeat them and fight to become the trader that we aspire to be, every time we step into the ring!