The Discipline of Discomfort: What Every Serious Trader Learns

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• 0:00Speaker 00

  What's up everybody, I'm Michael Martin, thanks for being here. So, I want to give a shout out to my man MJ, who comments a lot on the videos and I appreciate that, I love the engagement, that's what keeps the community rocking and rolling. This is, um, he's commented quite a bit on the videos, most recently on one from last week called "Learning to Sit on Profits." And there's a couple of things to say here, so I want to give coaching tip to MJ, we've never met, we've never spoken, but I do want to give a shout out, I love the engagement, it means a lot to me. Viewers like MJ kind of drive the channel in many ways, because the engagement and the great questions and the great comments perpetuate the conversation for everybody.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  So, on the one comment, he said, "I always love listening to your videos and I think you do bring a good perspective to the market." Here's the word that negates all that though, "But, there's still an element to me that feels like you're basically an old fogey," he says, "speaking from a totally different era in terms of how the market works." Well, I disagree. Um, I'm not talking about yesteryear in that context. What I'm sharing with is of a way that, my content is relatable, if nothing else, it's relatable. Because you're, you have to face the same types of challenges that I had to face.

• 1:26Speaker 00

  Now, the inputs might be different, but the challenges for traders are basically the same. We have to screen for names, we have to figure out what our "R" is, what makes it worth our while, how much money we want to risk, right, of our account. Do we want to add risk at opportune times and build into the position? Or, do we kind of want to put on, I don't know, 2 or 3X more trades and have to make it and take it with like a scalping or swing trader mentality? That's all coming from your personality, you get to figure that out. So, um, there's another, the next part of the question is, "The idea of taking 13K and growing it to a large sum of money seems like a futile effort." I completely disagree. Here's why.

• 2:11Speaker 00

  And this is, this is something to take away for everybody, and again, this is not a dig on MJ, MJ is an MVP at this account, okay? You have to start, when you think about goal-setting, from the inside and reflect that outwards. Who cares what the market's doing? That's not a stumbling block, the person is. The individual is 75 to 90% of what goes into trading, their emotional makeup, their psychology. The market environment is something that you can absolutely overcome, if you listen. Chapter 2 of the book is surrender. People get in their own way, I've mentioned on the show before, I'm a Buddhist in many ways, although I was raised Irish Catholic, that man is the, is the cause of all his own suffering. I know I'm butchering that, but you get the picture.

• 2:55Speaker 00

  So it's up to you to figure out, you the listener, not you MJ, but you, you the watcher, you the listener, to figure out how to overcome whatever challenges you have. I share my relatable stories because they, you can identify with them, because you're going through that right now, it might not be the same thing. I had eights and quarters, you have quote stuffing and high-frequency trading and, and you know, painting the tape, which when I started was illegal. You know, you could use your, lose your license for that. Not my license, but market makers who are sitting on what was called a Level 3, that's where they input the data that shows up on the Level 2 that you might be watching for depth of market or for scalping opportunities, right?

• 3:37Speaker 00

  So, painting the tape is an expression for changing size and prices to make it look like there's more activity in the stock than there actually is. I think today they call it spoofing. Right? So, I absolutely think I can do it today in terms of what opportunities are out there. Why? Well, because I narrow it down to just one or two types of setups. I'm not, uh, we're gonna talk about this more tomorrow, but you can do it, you have to be patient though, because just like everything else, it's life on life's terms. So this is definitely directed to MJ, I want to say MJ, start from the inside out, don't worry about the market environment, you decide what you want, and then make that happen.

• 4:20Speaker 00

  Because otherwise, you and I both can become, I don't want to say victims, but have poor me's about the market. One, no one cares. No one cares how difficult the market is for me or you or anybody. They just see things through their own personal lens. So, when I teach, the first lesson that we have in goal-setting is, set a goal that expands your horizons, meaning you don't have to know how to do it to get the result that you want. That petrifies most people and they say, "Well, I don't know how to do that, so I can't set that as a goal. What I want to do is, I want to get a new pair of golden gooses, or I want to get a new car, or I want to buy a sleeve of tattoos." Like, you know, already know how to do that, right? So that's not really your goal, that's a task. Your goals should scare you.

• 5:04Speaker 00

  And I endeavor to take on goals that frighten me, that, you know, they're gonna leave stretch marks. I like to do things that really challenge me. One might be, um, although I have a long way to go, get my art in a gallery, or get a major purchaser, a major art collector to get interested in my art. I have never done that. I don't know how to do it, but I'm gonna do it. Because I can find the list of the big collectors, and I can solicit them, I can send out JPEGs, I have friends of friends, so, I don't know, I don't know how it's gonna happen, it's going to happen, I don't know how, I don't know when, but it's going to happen. When I started Jiu-Jitsu, I was over 50 years old.

• 5:47Speaker 00

  And I told the teacher when I met him, I said, "I'm here to, you know, learn and master to the best of my ability what you're gonna teach." You know, and eventually got a black belt. 1 in 10,000 people who start Jiu-Jitsu, you know, go on to get a black belt. I wanted a big challenge, I wanted to challenge myself to go outside myself, because I didn't know how to do that, I hadn't had any martial arts. I had some, but I wasn't able to do it consistently, because I tried to do it while I was in college, and the truth was, I just didn't have the bandwidth. So I was a little ambitious in what I wanted to do, then when I started my career on Wall Street, it was also the same thing. I had to market, I had to do the research, I just never had the time to do the things

• 6:30Speaker 00

  that I, that I wanted to do outside trading, because I didn't want to go back to blue-collar despair. So, I had to take a step back and say, "Okay, what is gonna really set me free to get me to a point where I can practice more on my guitar, take some lessons with like a John Abercrombie, you know, a Mike Stern kind of a deal, a Barelli LaGreen, a Larry Coriel, you know, what do I have to do to get into the league where it would make sense for them to be my teacher, right?" So that, that was a big challenge. Um, you know, getting the black belt, learning how to paint, anything like that, and then approaching people who really know quality over Shinola, if you will, is intimidating, because you, you could look at them and they could say, "You know, I just don't see anything here." And that's the way it goes.

• 7:15Speaker 00

  But that's just one person's opinion, right? So I have to keep moving forward and doing things that start from inside me. I don't care what the market environment is, I'm going to win, that's what my, I do, that's what I do, I win. That's my nature. Doesn't matter the task, once I decide that it's what I want to do, because I want to achieve it, or it gives me pleasure, then that's the way it's gonna be. I've surrendered to the fact that I don't know how to do things, and I don't know when it's gonna occur. The other thing that saves me here is I don't open my big mouth on social media and start boasting and peacocking about all the wonderful things I'm gonna do. Like Stephen Covey says, "Keep the most important things to you close to the vest." I don't have to broadcast any of it.

• 7:58Speaker 00

  So, I put my head down and say, "In spite of, or despite of whatever's going on in the market, I'm gonna win. I'll figure it out." It, it just takes a little effort. Sometimes it means taking a step back and looking at things while, instead of being so active every day. But, I think it's absolutely feasible. Three, although I don't know who the people are personally, uh, two weeks ago, I was grateful to be invited to see some of my old friends in the business of over 20 years, Steve Spencer and Mike Bell, actually Mike was in Spring Lake, he couldn't make it that day, I think his dad was in town. But Steve was there and Jeff Holden were there, and we chatted, you know, and I know personally that there are people there, and granted, it's a, it's a training firm,

• 8:43Speaker 00

  who start, people who started with virtually no money and went on to make millions. If you do any type of search on YouTube, you can find people who started with less than 10,000. See, where's the 13,000 come from in the comment? The 13K is the future value, today's value of what I started with back in 1989, which was 5K. So if you take into account inflation, 5K then is about 13K now, in case you missed that part. So, there's plenty of videos out there, if you look up, say, "Trader who started with 3K, trader who started with 5K, trader who started with 500 and turned it into 100K", it's absolutely doable. The, the thing that they all had, it wasn't a sense of, of timing or whatever, it's they had a goal to grow their money.

• 9:28Speaker 00

  That's, that's why we do goal planning and goal-setting upfront, first. It is the most important thing before you buy an extra monitor, a keyboard that you can program hotkeys, that's all incidental. Right? What you need to do is to start upfront and say, "What is it that you want to do?" And then have the, what's the word I want to use? It starts with a B and ends with L, but we could say, "Gumption" is a more polite term for mixed company, to just go out and do it and say, "I don't care what hurdles come," right? Isn't that Napoleon? He said, "I don't care what obstacles get in my way along the way of a, of a campaign, I am going to hit my objective."

• 10:08Speaker 00

  So, you know, I don't, I don't get psyched out from those types of things, you know. In another comment, the same person, MJ mentioned something like,

• 10:21Speaker 00

  "Where I struggle that I don't see anyone doing it successfully right now. I think they're out there, you just gotta look harder. There's plenty of videos out there where people are succeeding." "Furu," I don't know what that means. "Maybe fake guru," I don't know, this is a young person acronym. Or, "There once you peel back the curtain," or "That they were a has been." Look at me, I'm 60 years old. Within the next 10 years, I'm gonna be a has been. It's the natural order of things. There becomes a period of time where you just don't have the stamina, or the interest. Does that mean that for two seconds, I'm not gonna be able to share my wisdom and help the up and comers? So I welcome that. You're looking at a future has been. I totally will wear that like a four-star, you know, full admiral.

• 11:06Speaker 00

  It's just the natural order of how things go. So, it's part of growing up. But in the meantime, what I want you all to do is start to think about like, what is it that you want? How do you want trading to serve you in your life? That has to be something that you know beforehand. Don't just come into trading and think like, "I'm gonna mix it up." I encourage you to do the trading, because the trading is gonna be your best teacher, more than anybody, even myself, because like, anything else, like painting jiu-jitsu, playing a sport, sex, it's experiential, you have to do it. And that to me is the only way you can calibrate how you think and how you feel, with what you know how to do.

• 11:45Speaker 00

  It's the single best way to do it. Of course, I can help you accelerate your learning curve and go parabolic and all this and that, if you know how to listen, and if you can submit to the process. But for the most part, I believe, if I've had any success in life, it's a couple of reasons. One, I have a strong inner voice, I'm willing to try things, I'm willing to embrace enormous amounts of uncertainty and not know, like, when it's gonna happen, or how it's gonna happen. I like that process of trying to figure it out. And in the end of the day, I'm a math modeler. So I have to tinker, I have to see, like, okay, how can we recreate, how can I create the model for this? And that's part of the fun. And so, I think if you can embrace that and learn to live with that uncertainty, there's pretty much unlimited as to how much money you can make.

• 12:30Speaker 00

  And if you look at any of the people, right, I just read the new Market Wizards book, you know, some of them who became very, very successful, couldn't do anything right the first year. And then, once something clicked, it was like, "Look out." You just knew they were destined for greatness. In their own way, right? It might not be great to you, but, you know, it was great enough to be included in the book, and this and that. So, I would embrace that uncertainty, and start from the inside. How do you want trading to serve you? And what do you want the money to do for you? Like, just accumulating, saying, "I wanna make a million dollars," is not a goal, right? It's an empty banal kind of statement that people just kinda say, because you think that that's a big number. It is and it's not, right? It depends where you come from.

• 13:15Speaker 00

  But two, it's like, what's the motivating factor? If you can put that, like, what do you wanna do? You wanna pay off your parents' mortgage? Do you wanna start to fund Section 529 college savings plans for your unborn children, or your unborn grandchildren? That's all legit. That's gonna help pull you towards achieving your goal, when you can put a meaning or a definition on the money. Because the money in and of itself doesn't mean anything, it's just a number. And you could throw out any number. But when I hear that, I think it's like, that's kinda like New Year's resolution, "I only smoke when I drink," kinda bullshit, you know, goal. That doesn't last more than through the end of that January. So, props to everybody who's trying this. Don't be cynical, there's plenty of successful people out there that you can learn from.

• 14:00Speaker 00

  But that's all from a future has been. I love everybody who comes here and wants to learn and who comments. It means a lot to me, because it keeps the conversation moving forward. And the channel wouldn't mean anything if you weren't here, right? So I appreciate you. Please like and subscribe, and you go to Trader Mindset, you can get a copy of the audiobook version of my book, The Inner Voice Trading. I appreciate you all being here, it's gonna be a great week. And I'll see you tomorrow.