 Welcome back to the Trade Hacker Mindset. In this episode, I wanna talk about loving the process of trading. 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. All right, so let's jump into this discussion about loving the process of trading, by the way. At the time of this recording, it's 537 AM. Still dark outside. I'm on a little walk this morning. So if you hear some birds chirping, crickets chirping, cars driving by, maybe a couple of airplanes here and there. Well, it'll be like you're on the walk with me. So let's jump in. It literally, like I said, it's 538 AM now and feels like it's 94 degrees out. Super humid here. Anyway, so I wanna talk about the process of loving to trade because what I think happens to a lot of people who are drawn into trading is maybe they see something online about some extreme returns that they can make or they have a friend who bought a meme stock on the way up and they made thousands of dollars in a very short period of time. There's some type of lottery-type mindset that I think initially draws a lot of people to trading, which is unfortunate because when you get in for that reason a lot of times, it's hard to break out of that mindset, right? It's hard to break out of the mindset of thinking that you're going to make a lot of money quickly and it's gonna be easy and you don't have to put a lot of effort. You just have to get lucky or you just have to know somebody on the inside who knows some inside information or whatever it is, right? So I think for a lot of new traders, that's kind of the start of their journey and just like any type of profession, if you get into that career, if you get into that profession, if you are doing something just for the money, it typically doesn't last, right? I mean, think about, I used to work with a lot of physicians. If you get into medicine because you're doing it because you think that doctors make a lot of money, you are going to end up hating the rest of your life, right? And I know this from personal experience in working with physicians who literally did just that. I mean, they went through four years of medical school, four years of residency, specialty, blah, blah, blah, 10, 12 years of schooling so they could start making that money that they were looking for. The problem is they didn't really like medicine, which is kind of a scary thing if you think about because think about if you have a serious health concern that requires surgery and the surgeon that you're going to see is just going through the motions for the paycheck. That is not a situation that I wanna find myself in at any point in my life, right? So, and the same thing happens with trading where if you get into trading just for the money and you don't actually love the process of learning to trade, then it's probably going to be a short-lived career, right? You're probably gonna make some trades here and there, you know, end up losing some money and quitting. I mean, that is the reality and that's the reality of why 95% of traders fail is because they don't get into it understanding that it does take effort, that it does take time, that it does take experience that they actually have to learn all the nuances of trading. It's not just a get rich quick kind of a scheme. You know, a while back I was talking to Tim Weiss who's our red strategy director, a lot of you all in the community know Tim and he was on, he lives in Hawaii, but he was on vacation back to the continental US to visit some family and we were talking about a week or two into his vacation and prior to leaving, he mentioned in the community, hey, I'm gonna be taking a few weeks off, I'm not gonna be posting my video updates or communicating a lot in the community, so I wasn't sure if he was actually gonna be not trading for those few weeks or whatever, so when we were having a conversation about a week or two into his vacation, I said, hey Tim, I'm curious, are you actually not trading for the next few weeks or are you just not posting your updates and communication in the community? And he said, oh, no, no, no, no. He said, I'm still trading. And I said, oh, okay. I said, because I don't know if there's ever been a three week period in my life, you know, trading career for the last 20 years where I haven't actually traded for that long. And he's like, no, he's like, yeah, I just with traveling and everything, it would be difficult to keep up with the video updates and things like that, but I'm absolutely still placing trades. And we've started talking about people like us who are traders, who are just, who are true traders who love the process of trading, who love the process of learning to trade, who love the process of learning different nuances to extract money out of the market. It's just, it's something that we're passionate about. It's something that we wake up in the middle of the night thinking about. It's something that we go to bed at night thinking about before we go to sleep. It's, you know, when we're having conversations with other people, we're thinking about different trading strategies, you know, that kind of, maybe you may call it a mental illness, I don't know, but the bottom line is if you don't have that real love, that real ingrained passion to learn to trade, then it's gonna be very difficult for you to master and it's gonna be very difficult for you to be successful at. Early in my trading career, I've mentioned a lot of times in different videos in this podcast that, you know, I was very inconsistent at best in my first 10 years of trading. So there were a lot of times that I quit trading for a period of time. So I guess you could say that, you know, there were periods of time that I wasn't trading for weeks at a time, but not very many. But, you know, sometimes I'd quit for a day or two days or three days or whatever. But my point is when you have this just burning desire, when you have this passion to become successful at trading or anything else in life, then when you have that, it's almost like you can't breathe without it. You know, I've talked about when we have long holiday weekends where there's a holiday on a Monday. So the markets close Friday, Saturday, Sunday. By Monday, I am like burning to get back into the market. Right, I'm burning to get back into trading. I'm burning to get back to interacting with the navigation trading community because it's just something that I love to do. And part of that passion is not only finding little nuances and trading strategies that can help improve them. But one of my biggest passions now is sharing those ideas with the community and showing people things that they may not have thought of before. And that just has become a burning passion of mine over the last few years. So one of my questions to you is, are you passionate about learning to trade? Are you passionate about the process of learning to trade? It's not about the end goal of making money. If you're passionate only about the end goal of making money, you will fail as a trader. Or I should say there is a very high likelihood that you will fail as a trader. What happens is when you're only passionate about trading is the end goal of making money, you're not gonna be able to deal with the negative parts. And the negative parts usually equates to the losing part. When it comes to trading, you have to be successful at taking losses, okay? It's easy to put a trade on and book a winner. Everybody feels like a genius when they do that, right? But it's how you deal with the losses that's the biggest hurdle that newer traders have to overcome to end up being successful in the long run. And this concept is not just for trading, right? I mean, I already mentioned the example of a physician who's just doing it for the money and just going through the motions for the paycheck. But it applies to a lot of different things in life. Think about, I mean, for me anyway, I mean, think about when you're getting ready to go on vacation. I mean, to me, it's almost the process of planning what you're going to do and the excitement building up to your vacation and kind of the little bit of stress maybe around work. You're trying to get a lot of stuff done before you leave and get everything set up so things don't fall apart while you're gone. You know, it's that whole anticipation and build up of the vacation. And it's like, as soon as I get on the plane and I'm there, it's kind of like, eh, you know, it's okay, it's great. Don't get me wrong. I love, you know, I love beaches. I love relaxing. I love taking time off and doing things like that. But it's almost like the process, the journey, the build up, the anticipation of vacation is actually better than the actual vacation. And I think that's probably true for anyone who is just ultra passionate about something. You know, whether it's if you're a business owner, if you're an entrepreneur, you probably can't breathe without being in your business and building your business. If you're an athlete, if you're a professional football player, all you wanna do, all you wanna think about, all you care about is the process of playing the game. And the athletes who really excel are the ones who actually love practice as well. Not just playing the game, not just the Super Bowl championship, but actually the process of honing their skill on the practice field. And getting bigger, faster, stronger in the weight room. And I've actually met professional athletes who actually don't like what they do. And it shows, it shows on the field. Now you might say, okay, well, they're a professional athlete. So they are at the top of their game. But think about this, there are a lot of individuals who have natural body types, who have natural muscular, you know, body types and playing sports and excelling in athletics and their coordination skills. It all comes very natural and they didn't have to work very hard to get to that point. So based on that natural ability, they were just kind of expected to continue playing and they got to the highest level of, let's say the NFL. And they didn't really like playing football and it showed. You know, I knew a kid in college that I went to high school with who was just an absolute beast of a running back. He could have played any D one school. He could have ended up in the NFL, but he just, he didn't really like it. He never, he never worked out, yet he was the biggest, strongest kid on the team. And he just, he ended up going to college and playing a couple of years at a mid-level type school. But, and everyone around him was like, what a waste of talent. But the reality was, he just wasn't passionate about playing football, whereas somebody who didn't have the physical abilities and didn't have necessarily the natural skills, but somebody who worked super, super hard and loved the game was able to excel at a much higher level than he was. A couple of years ago, I was talking to an individual who's a seven foot, seven foot tall man, okay? When you're seven feet tall, what are you expected to do in life? Play basketball, right? You are closer to that rim. And so if you're not, if you're seven foot and you're not playing basketball, something's wrong with you, right? And so I was talking to this individual and they played at a very high level, D1 school ended up playing professional basketball, not the NBA, but at a very high level, but they didn't even really like basketball. They just, you know, they were just told their entire life how great they could be because of their natural height that he continued to play basketball, but he told me point blank that he was not passionate about basketball. And if you think about it, someone at that level probably instead of playing overseas, they probably would have been able to play in the NBA, make millions of dollars if he was passionate about what he was doing and if he was passionate about the process of playing basketball, okay? Not just the game, not just the championships of winning a basketball, but the process of practicing and honing his skill every day. So again, I don't want to beat a dead horse here, but when it comes to trading, where are you mentally? Are you in a mindset that you're just doing it trying to make a quick buck or are you of the mindset that you love the process of learning to trade? Losing trades and all. Because I'll tell you this, and believe me, this is absolutely true. You know, when I say this, it's gonna, you're probably gonna really rise and think, eh, that's not true, but I actually kind of, and not so much anymore, but as I was learning to trade, you know, specifically in my first 10 years, I actually liked losing trades. Let me say that again. I actually liked losing trades. Now, let me clarify. Not because I like losing money. I hate losing money in trading, okay? But when I was learning to trade, I knew that there was going to be a process of learning to trade and losing money. I accept from day one, and I don't know where I got this if it's just something that I just came up with on my own or if I heard it from my mentor who's teaching me to trade or heard it somewhere, but I knew from day one almost, as early back as I can remember my trading career anyway, I knew that I was going to lose money at first, and I just accepted that as the tuition for the University of Learning to Trade. And so when I would lose, again, let me clarify. I wouldn't like it, but in my mind, and even I talked about this out loud, on a conscious level, I thought about when I had a losing trade that yes, I had a losing trade. Yes, that sucked. But you know what? I am that much closer to becoming a successful trader. I know that's going to sound foreign to a lot of you listening here, but that's almost the reality. It's almost the mindset that you have to have. In fact, I've talked to over the years, I've talked to probably hundreds of successful traders, right? And invariably, and I haven't asked them that specific question to the T, every single time, but I know I've had this conversation with a lot of successful traders. And in every single case, they've had that same mindset. They've had the mindset that when they were learning to trade, they knew that losing was part of the process and they knew that losing trades was going to help them learn to become successful. They knew that taking losses was going to get them one step closer to being consistently winning. So if you're not passionate about the process of learning to trade, if you're not passionate about the ups and downs and the nuances of trading, and if you were just looking at it as something on the side to make some money, you're dabbling, then there's a good chance that you're probably not going to be successful. And I don't want to discourage you because I don't want anyone to quit trading because I think there's always a kind of a point of capitulation if you want to call it that. I'm not sure if that's the right word, but there's a point for everyone where if you get over that hump, you have a very high likelihood of becoming successful. The problem is that very few people get to that point because they get discouraged, they get unmotivated, and it's all because they don't love the process. It's all because their expectation or their goal is just making money and not actually learning how to trade. So I hope this was helpful. Thanks for coming along on my walk this morning. And if you want to be part of a community of like-minded traders, just go to community.navigationtrading.com. We've got hundreds of traders interacting on a daily basis, not only about the mindset stuff, but also sharing trade ideas with the sole purpose of helping each other become better traders. I look forward to seeing you on the inside and we'll see you in the next episode.