Pod Insights Michael Covel's Trend Following Ep. 1389: F*** Dark Times with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio About this episode Please enjoy my monologue F*** Dark Times with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio. This episode may also include great outside guests from my archive.
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I'm MICHAEL COVEL, the host of TREND FOLLOWING RADIO, and I'm proud to have delivered 10+ million podcast listens since 2012. Investments, economics, psychology, politics, decision-making, human behavior, entrepreneurship and trend following are all passionately explored and debated on my show.
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Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 I'm going to try something a little different today. No guests, no market talk, no systems, no performance numbers. I want to talk about something that I think is pretty important right now. Mindset. Yeah, you've heard the word. It's everywhere. Motivational posters, Instagram, corporate retreat slides, whatever, it's everywhere. But here's the thing. Here's why I'm doing this episode today. Look around. I mean, really look around. Wars, multiple wars. Fuel prices moving in ways that affects every single human being on this planet. Inflation is killing savings. That's money that people spend decades building up.
0:44 Speaker 00 Governments are dysfunctional and that's saying it nicely. Some are evil. The news cycle relentless fire hose of catastrophe. Programmed insanity. Social media algorithms shows you the worst every day. And of course, there's the private battles, health, relationships, careers, purpose. Nobody escapes this life without a real fight. But look, in the middle of all that, that noise, that weight, that uncertainty, you have a choice. Not about the war or gas or whatever is happening in Washington or London or Beijing. You have a choice about your own mind.
1:25 Speaker 00 That is the only real frontier, the one between your ears, the one that nobody can take from you unless you let them. Today I want to share some voices that have genuinely shaped the way that I think about this. A Stanford psychologist, Carol Dweck. She wrote the book mindset. Tony Robbins, who some of you might roll your eyes at, but if you do roll your eyes at Tony Robbins, you're an idiot. And a younger entrepreneur, a guy that I follow named Alex Hormozi. He has a way of cutting through the complexity, getting to the bone of what actually matters. These aren't trading ideas. They're not investing strategies. However, all of this information will help you with your trading and your investing. But today is about the operating system underneath everything else.
2:08 Speaker 00 The you, the thing that determines whether your system, whatever it is, actually gets executed. Because look, after all these years of studying performance about people who actually win in hard conditions. And the moments when everyone around them is falling apart, it comes back to the mind. Carol Dweck identified something true, something that's always there, but nobody had named cleanly until she did. And what she did was quite simple in a way. The core idea, there are two fundamentally different ways that human beings relate to their own abilities. Dweck named them the fixed mindset and the growth mindset. In the fixed mindset, you believe that your qualities are carved in stone.
2:51 Speaker 00 You're smart or you're not, you're talented or you're not, you're a leader or you're not. And because those things feel fixed and permanent, every challenge you face becomes a test, a test of whether you really are who you think you are. Failure becomes a verdict on your identity, so you avoid challenges. Yeah, people just shy away from doing things that might show weakness. Stick to what you already know you're good at. You spend a hell of a lot of time trying to look competent rather than actually getting better. I mean, seriously, think about the last time you didn't start something because you weren't sure you had the talent or you were afraid you're gonna fail. That's the fixed mindset operating in you, in me, all of us. Dweck is not saying you're one or the other. She's saying these are patterns and you can shift them.
3:36 Speaker 00 Now, the other side, as you already guessed, is where you want to be, the growth mindset. This is where people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through education and hard work. Brains and talent are just the starting point. And that view, that simple belief, creates a love of learning, a resilience, essential for any great accomplishment. But think about what it really means. It means effort has a point. It means failure is information. It means challenges aren't threats, they're opportunities. The way she describes it, in a growth mindset, challenges are exciting rather than threatening. So rather than thinking, oh, I'm gonna reveal my weakness, you say, wow, here's a chance to grow.
4:18 Speaker 00 That, my friends, ladies and gentlemen, that is the complete reframe. The same event, a challenge, a setback, a hard situation, means something entirely different depending on which layers you're looking through. To the fixed mindset person, a difficult situation is potential exposure. They're not as smart or as capable or as talented as they've been pretending to be. They flinch, they hedge, they make excuses. The growth mindset, that same difficult situation is a gym. It's where you go to get stronger. Difficulty is not an indictment, it's an invitation. Now let me connect it to a real world right now. Gas prices up, war breaks out, news really see dark.
5:02 Speaker 00 Things are out of my control, the world is broken, there's nothing I can do. Then you start to look for someone to blame. You look for an explanation that doesn't require any fucking change on your part. The growth mindset, a touch different. What can I learn from this? What does this situation demand from me that I haven't developed yet? What skill, what perspective, what capacity do I need to build right freaking now? There's another piece of Dweck's work that I want to highlight. It has a lot to do with failure. Because as she says, failure is information. We label it failure, but it's more like, this didn't work. I'm a problem solver and I will try something else. Think about how radical that is.
5:47 Speaker 00 Especially in the educational system, which is all based on memorization and grades, judging you on your memorization. There is no opportunity for failure. It's just get the highest grades and then supposedly, somebody will be standing there to reward you when you get your fucking degree. Failure is literal data. Information about what doesn't work. You then redirect toward what might. Because look, when you take away the emotional charge at a failure and turn it into information, everything changes. You stop fearing it. You stop avoiding the situations that might produce it. You start moving faster, taking more swings and learning more. The world can feel heavy, right now for a lot of people. Very heavy.
6:32 Speaker 00 The fixed mindset says, this is too much, I can't win, it's all out of my hands. Okay, go jump off the bridge. The growth mindset says, this is where I find out what I'm made of. This is where the meaning is. Okay, let me move to my second important person today, Tony Robbins. You know, there's two camps about Tony Robbins. One sees the infomercials, the fire walks, the screaming arenas full of people. They tune out, they walk away, they say this is bullshit. But let me take you a little bit deeper, if you will let me. Let's start with one of his most fundamental ideas. Success is 80% psychology and 20% mechanics. 80%, he's not saying mechanics don't matter. He's not saying you don't need skills, knowledge, strategy.
7:18 Speaker 00 He's saying the thing that determines whether any of that gets deployed, whether any of that actually turns into results, that's in your freaking head. Robbins has a concept he calls your story. He says, "The only thing that keeps you from getting what you want is the story you keep telling yourself." We all have stories about who we are, what we deserve, what's possible for us. Most of the time, we don't even know we're running these stories. You get passed over for a promotion and the story says, "This is just how it is for me." The market goes against you and the story says, "I knew I wasn't cut for this." Someone rejects you and the story says, "Of course, look at me." These narratives that you've been rehearsing, in some cases for years? This is just bullshit.
8:02 Speaker 00 You can rewrite the script. As Tony says, "Progress equals happiness." Not achievement, not arrival, not winning. Progress makes you happy. What's progress? The flow state. Mahaly Chiksumahai. Go read his book. That's what he's saying here. This gets lost in the culture of highlight reels and big outcomes. We're all waiting for the thing that's going to make us happy. The business that succeeds, the relationship that works, the number in the account, the body we're trying to build. We think happiness lives at the destination. But Robbins knows better. People are happiest when they are moving, when there's momentum, when they can feel themselves growing.
8:46 Speaker 00 And that's why this is important to think about in dark times. If the world is slightly overwhelming, when the destination seems impossibly far away, you don't need to figure out the whole journey. You need to move one step today, right now. That first step creates progress. It gives you more surface area. Progress creates the emotional state that makes the next step possible. Here's another Robbins line that I want to put in front of you. When you are grateful, fear disappears and abundance appears. What Robbins is going for is this neurological reality.
9:27 Speaker 00 You cannot be in a state of genuine gratitude and simultaneously be in a state of fear. The brain doesn't work that way. Fear is about lack, the future, the threat, the thing you might lose. Gratitude is about presence, what already exists, what is already real, the moment of freaking now. We live in a world where sons of bitches behind the scenes have specifically engineered social media and news to trigger your fear response. Cause that engages your emotion. It engages your attention and they make fucking money off you. Another Robbins concept that I love, brings it back to Dweck's fixed mindset.
10:11 Speaker 00 It's in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped. Not your moments of talent, not your moments of luck, your moments of decision. That's an extraordinary claim. He's saying the arc of life is determined, not by what you're born with, not by your circumstances you're placed in, but by the choices you make. Specifically, the choices you make at the moments when it would be easier not to decide, when it would be easier to stay where you are, when the status quo has inertia and changing it requires friction. And here's the hard truth built into that. If your destiny is shaped by your decisions, then the life you have right now, to a meaningful degree, the result of your past decisions. Yeah, uncomfortable.
10:53 Speaker 00 It's supposed to be uncomfortable because the flip side of that discomfort is power. If your decisions brought you here, your decisions can take you somewhere else, somewhere different. Robbins didn't start with much, but he's built an empire. And he's built an empire on these kinds of lift you up insights. So go ahead, make fun of Tony Robbins because he's made a business, because he's employed people, because some of it can look hokey. But if you get down to it and you look at the engine and you look at Tony Robbins and you're thinking all kinds of negative things, you are a fucking loser.
11:35 Speaker 00 You might not have heard of Alex Hormozi if you're Gen X or older, or millennial even, but he's a younger guy, entrepreneur, started with nothing. He sees all this. We're drowning in complexity. We have more access to more information, more opinions, more frameworks, more systems than at any point in human history. And a lot of people, they're not any better off for it. They're confused, paralyzed, overwhelmed. Hormozi cuts things back to the bone, strips it away. One of his most quoted lines? "Success is just doing the obvious thing longer than most people are willing to do it." Isn't that brilliant? Not the optimized thing, not the clever thing, not the disruptive thing, the obvious thing.
12:19 Speaker 00 The thing that you already know you should be doing, the thing that isn't glamorous, that doesn't generate likes, that isn't a new idea, just the obvious thing, done consistently, done for longer than everyone else is willing to do it. That runs counter to the entire self-improvement industry. They sell novelty, new techniques, new frameworks, new gurus, new systems. Novelty gets clicks, novelty sells books. Hormozi's watched thousands of businesses closely, and most failure is not caused by a lack of good ideas. It's caused by a lack of sustained execution on ideas that were already working. People quit, they pivot, they get bored, they get distracted.
13:03 Speaker 00 They see something shiny and they chase it. They mistake motion for progress, and they stop doing the obvious thing right before it would have taken off. Hormozi says, "Look, discipline is the ability to keep promises to yourself, not to your boss, not to your clients, not to your family, to yourself." That's profound. What he's really framing is integrity, self-integrity. The alignment between what you say you're going to do and what you actually do, when you keep promises to yourself.
13:37 Speaker 00 I wasn't joking when I said at the top, this was not a market episode, and it's not, but, hint, hint, it really is. Hermosy has this great line about identity that connects directly back to what Dweck was talking about. He's fond of saying, "A focused fool can accomplish more than a distracted genius." There you go for all you people out there that think it's only about horsepower. Yeah, don't get me wrong, it is about horsepower. But if you don't use your horsepower, if you don't exercise your horsepower, well, you're fucked too. I mean, think about it, how many brilliant people do you know not doing much with their brilliance?
14:18 Speaker 00 How many smart people have you met who are stuck, scattered, unfocused, moving in 10 directions, getting nowhere? And how many people have you met who aren't the most naturally gifty person in the room, but just keep showing up, keep grinding, keep doing the one thing they said they were going to do, and they're actually building something? Focus, you see, is a resource, and in an age of infinite distraction, focus is arguably the scariest and most valuable resource any of us can have. And it's not given to you, it's chosen repeatedly every day. Another Hermosy pearl of wisdom? Want to know how long it's going to take to get over disappointment? As long as you decide it takes. Boom, boom, right?
15:03 Speaker 00 So true about emotional recovery, whatever recovery you need to do, losing money, losing a relationship. It all comes down to your decision to admit when it's over. No one's going to ring a bell, it's about you. You know, I said at the top, things can feel heavy right now. Wars, inflation, dysfunction, uncertainty. I'm not going to pretend that mindset is a magic shield against any of that. Real things happen, real consequences hit. But here's what I do know, and I've seen this play out over and over again. The external circumstances do not determine the outcome.
15:47 Speaker 00 The internal orientation does.
15:51 Speaker 00 Two people can face the exact same crisis. Same market crash, same layoffs, same diagnosis, same war in the same country. And one of them is destroyed and the other comes out on the other side having built something that they couldn't have built without it. The difference is not luck, the difference is not talent. The difference is how they relate to the event in their own mind. Whether they decide this event is a verdict or a variable. And that means whether they decide this event is a verdict or a variable. Whether they stay curious or they go freaking numb. Whether they look for what they can still control or collapse into everything they kept. The world will keep producing hard times.
16:35 Speaker 00 That's always been true. The question that Dweck and Robbins and Hormozzi are all circling in their different languages and different registers. What do you do with the hard thing? Do you let it define you or do you let it develop you? I'm sure there are people listening right now who are in genuinely difficult situations. I can't make that go away. I can't fix the gas price. I can't fix the war. But I believe, and I believe this completely, the decision to face it with a growth mindset, to keep your standards up, to tell yourself a different story, to keep moving, to keep your promises to yourself, to stay focused on what you could actually do. That decision changes the outcome. Not magically right now, over time.
17:20 Speaker 00 Through accumulated action and accumulated evidence that you are more capable than the fixed mindset told you. I want to leave you today with one more thing that Carol Dweck said. Becoming is better than being. That is life. Becoming is open-minded. Becoming doesn't require you to be already there. Becoming just requires you to be moving in the direction of something that matters with honest effort, with curiosity about what the next step reveals. Yeah, the world is loud, the news is loud, whatever. Don't match it, don't absorb it. Get quiet, go inward. Who are you becoming?
18:02 Speaker 00 Because that is the takeaway this week. Because if you don't know who the hell you are becoming, you've got really big problems. But here's the great final salvo. You can figure out who you're becoming. It's a choice. It's a decision. See you again next week.
18:27 Speaker 00 I see a time when those awake will understand how to make money in up, down, and surprise markets. Whether a new trader or experienced, college student or financial advisor, protecting against a crash, or just trying to make a lot of money,
18:46 Speaker 00 trend following offers everyone an answer in uncertain times. To get started immediately, send me an email, [email protected] . I will send you the right trend following steps to take, along with my free video.
19:03 Speaker 00 But if you want to buy and hold, trust the government and trust Wall Street, this is absolutely not for you.
Previous Ep. 1388: Ross Greene Interview with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio Next Ep. 1390: The Psychology of Persuasion with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio Page updated November 6, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
