 Welcome back to the Trade Hacker Mindset. In this episode, I want to talk to you about learning to trade options and learning to play the guitar. Trading the markets can be difficult to master and seemingly just out of reach. Professional traders have a secret. Trading requires total mental and emotional control. It requires the Trade Hacker Mindset. Alright, so let's jump into this topic of learning to trade options and learning to play the guitar. I've been wanting to learn how to play the guitar forever. And finally, a couple months ago, I decided to make the leap. I bought a guitar, I signed up for lessons, I go to lessons once a week, and it's been a real eye-opener to be quite frank. It has been a real eye-opener for me. And here's what I mean. To start with, let me back up a minute and make a couple of points before I jump into that. Number one, so I'm driving around. My youngest son and I are hanging out one day and he is pretty talented musically. He plays the keyboard. He goes to the School of Rock. He plays in concerts and all kinds of stuff. And he's been doing that for a few years and he's gotten really good at playing the keyboard. But before he started playing keyboard, he had tried basketball, he had tried baseball, he had tried soccer, he tried different things and just never really got into it. And I used to think he was kind of lazy, but the reality is he just wasn't passionate about those things and so he didn't want to practice those. He didn't care. But when it comes to playing the keyboard, he's really gotten into it. And so that's the first point. Number one is, and this goes for whether it's your career, it goes for whatever you're doing in life, you know, you sometimes you perceive people or maybe it's you, you perceive people as being lazy, but usually people are lazy because they just are not passionate about what they're doing. It goes for, you know, maybe you think this about your kids in school, maybe they get bad grades or they just don't like it. They don't complete their assignments. It's not necessarily because they're lazy. It's because they're not passionate about the system of school that they've been put into, right? So I think it's under, I think it's really important for us to be very self aware about ourselves and what we're passionate about and what we're not. If you're not passionate about something, there's nothing wrong with that. It doesn't make you lazy in that area. It just means that you have other things that trip your trigger, that gets you going, that gets your juices flowing, right? And so what I found out is, you know, so I've been, it's been a couple months, I've been going once a week to these lessons. And of course, the lessons are to kind of set a foundation and work with an instructor because literally I came in not knowing what a chord was. I don't even know what chords you play on a guitar. I don't know how to read music. I don't know what all those squiggly note lines on a music book. I had no idea what any of that meant. And so I go in and I take these lessons once a week, but the lessons are just to kind of create some exercises and create some things to get you learning how to play the guitar. To really learn how to play the guitar, you have to what? Practice, right? And so here, so here's the problem. Every time I would go home and I think, okay, I'm going to practice tonight. I would just, I would start getting this like, this like dreaded feeling like, ugh, it's so hard. I like, it's just like, it's just the concept of playing guitar. It's just, it's foreign to me. It's, it's very uncomfortable. It's really outside of my comfort zone. And so what happens is I literally in two months, I've practiced playing the guitar twice, twice. And so every time I go into this list and I show up for my lesson, I show up for my lesson every single week. And, and he asks me every single week. All right. So what did you, what did you practice? What do you, what have you been working on this week? And almost every time, except for those couple of times, I'm like, I didn't, I didn't actually pick up the guitar. I actually didn't do anything. And so we would. So our lesson consists of kind of reviewing what we've already gone over me just practicing some very simple basic chords that, you know, typically a seven year old learning guitar would, would be doing. And, and then I leave the lesson. I'm fired up. I'm like, I'm going to practice for 20 to 30 minutes every single day between now and the next lesson. And guess what happens? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. And so I, I started thinking about this from a perspective of somebody learning to trade options. If, if you come in to navigation trading, for example, you come into our community, you join our membership and you're, you're like, okay, I'm going to learn how to trade options. But you're not, but you're not actually passionate about learning to trade. What's going to happen is you're going to go to work. You're going to come home. You're going to be tired. I got to, I got to, I got to watch these videos. I got to mess with, with the platform. I got to start learning, learning these strategies. And what I see a lot of times is that that just never ends up happening. Right. I mean, I will see people who, who join and they'll be members for a while, but they'll just never do anything. And I, I always, I always just kind of wondered why, like, you know, to me, it's kind of a no brainer. I mean, options trading is amazing. It's fun. It's exciting. It's profitable. There's things to me, but it's not that way to everybody, which I mean, I, I understood that, but I'm seeing it through a whole new perspective. Now that I'm going through this whole guitar learning situation. And so I think, I think it's just really important that you need to be honest with yourself. You need to be self aware with yourself about if you're really passionate about this, because here's what I do know is that. If you are passionate about trading, if you are passionate about learning to trade, then you, you can build it into a very profitable career. Okay. But here's what else I know. If you're not passionate about it, and if you just came into it thinking it was a quick way to make some money, what's going to happen is it's going to be a quick way for you to lose money. And, you know, I want to be, I want to be very, very blunt about this because I think people get into trading for the wrong reason. I mean, of course, you know, the markets are all about extracting money, right? But you also have to be passionate about this. And, and another example is my older brother, he's, he's never traded and he came to me a while back and wanted to learn how to trade. And so I introduced him to one of our trading strategies, the NTT, because it's a very, it's a very simple thing, right? There's very clear cut rules. If this happens, you do this. If that happens, you do that. And, you know, and you can use very simple strategy. You can simply buy calls or buy puts, right? And so I thought, okay, this is a, this is a good way to start because, you know, he hasn't, he hasn't, he's not really familiar with spreads and that kind of thing. So I thought this will be a good place and easy way to, for him to start. And I remember on one of our, because I was, I was just kind of doing some one-on-one sessions with him once a week. We jump on a zoom call and, and I'd kind of walk him through certain things and kind of progress him through basically the same stuff I teach in the course, in the video courses, but, you know, he's my brother. So I was, I was doing it on a personal basis too. And he would watch the video and he'd write, have a bunch of questions and he'd, and then we'd get on and he'd, he'd ask me all these questions to clarify some things. And, and he was really like into it and he was really like, you know, really anxious to learn, but he's also, you know, he's more of an artistic type, he has more of an artistic type mind. I'm more of a logical, mathematical type mind. I don't, I can't remember, is it left brain, right brain, whatever it is. He's the other, he's the other one than me. But that doesn't, that doesn't mean just because you're artistic or musically inclined or whatever that, that doesn't mean you can't trade. It just means you, you learn a little bit different than other people. So anyway, I'm going through it. I'm teaching things. He's, he's asking questions and I'm, I'm, you know, laying things out in the best possible way that I can. And, you know, he just, he keeps like taking a deep breath kind of got this look in his eye like, oh my God, like just completely overwhelmed. And not, you know, it's just because he's never even, he's never, it's just new. It's like a foreign language, right? It's just like learning a new language to him. And so, I just, I just, you know, I just kind of thought it was funny and we kept doing things. Next thing you know, I didn't hear from him for a while. I shoot him a text. I'm like, Hey, how's the, how's the NTT stuff going? And he's like, Oh, you know, I got busy with work and I just, I haven't done anything. And, and it really comes down to, you know, Hey, you know, I mean, he was passionate at first. He wanted to learn, but it also wasn't something that could, you know, keep as it was such a struggle. So it was such as something that, that couldn't peak his interest, that couldn't keep his interest long enough that it, it eventually kind of just fizzled out and he never really did anything. Now he still might come back. I don't want to act like, you know, because there's a lot of things that I've started to learn and I've got busy and then I've gone back to you and it, it's become something I've, I've really gotten into. So that can happen too. But my, my point is going back to the whole guitar thing, I'm really, I'm really kind of struggling with if it's something that I'm going to do because literally I have guitar lessons tomorrow and I'm stressed out over the fact that I once again have not even picked up the guitar to practice. And so now I'm like, okay, I'm paying for these lessons. I'm stressing myself out because I'm not practicing when I know I should. I put it on my calendar. Like I scheduled to practice, you know, I put it on my calendar specifically so I'd practice. So now it's there on my calendar, looking me in the face and it's like, oh God, what, what can I think of that I have to do so that I don't have to practice the guitar kind of thing and it just keeps happening over and over and over. And so I'm now I'm like really trying to be real with myself and figure out, do I really want to play the guitar? Is it really something I want to do? Or is it just the idea of thinking about sitting around the campfire, strumming the guitar, singing along to my favorite song? Like, is it just the idea of playing guitar that I think is cool or do I really want to put in the effort and what it takes to play the guitar? And so I don't know the answer yet. I'm trying to figure that out. I'm hoping something clicks and here's what I also related back to options trading. Here's what I know is that if you can get through, get over the hump of just that first phase of kind of getting things to make sense and then placing your first trades and seeing, oh, you know what, it's really not rocket science. It's really not that difficult. Oh, wait, I just I actually just made some money. You know, if you can get to that point, then it's going to propel your interest and it's going to propel you to want to dig in deeper and go further and become more of an expert and learn more and do more and eventually it's going to start becoming easier and easier and easier to a point where now it's now it's just fun, right? And so I still have hope when it comes to the guitar that that's where I'm at that I just haven't gotten over that hump to where it's I can actually like I I'm still just trying to learn where to position my fingers to play different chords. I, you know, I haven't even been able to play a little riff or I haven't done any of that. And so I'm hoping that if I just stick with it long enough to get over that little hump to really like start playing a few little tunes and I can start playing them over and over and over and it becomes easy. Then I'm going to be excited to learn the next one and the next one and the next one and keep going and getting better and better and better and and then I will become passionate about it because what I also know is that maybe even if you get into trading just to make money you're not necessarily passionate about the process of trading then you can learn to be passionate about the process of trading. And just like the guitar I hope I get passionate about the process of learning to play the guitar because then I'll want to practice all the time right? And so I don't know I just I thought this was real very eye-opening from perspective of the similarities of learning to do different things and I just wanted to share it with you all because I have a little bit of new perspective on those who who just don't jump into the options trading and the courses and the learning as quickly as I think that they should I kind of get it now I kind of get it on a new level that I didn't get it before let's just say that so this is all to tell you I feel you but what I would tell you and what I'm going to try to do with guitar is take the next step put in the work put in consistent work maybe it's watch the courses like 30 minutes 60 minutes a day and then get to that next level and then keep going to the next level and then I promise you if you can do that it's going to get to a point where it's easy and I'm telling you this for trading options and I'm kind of telling myself this when it comes to playing guitar okay so this is a lesson for you it's a lesson for me I hope that helps I just wanted to share that with you if you're interested in if you haven't started learning to trade options and you're interested in starting that process kind of dipping your toe in the water the best place to start is go to our community you can interact with other like-minded traders just go to community.navigationtrading.com we look forward to seeing you on the inside I am there to help you along the way and be your instructor and yes you have to put in effort yes you have to practice but guess what it's worth it so I hope to see you on the inside see you in the next episode