Stepping into the Unknown

 When the going get tough, the tough get going. That's a phrase I'd heard my entire life, but it never really registered with me until just this moment for some reason. It was just a convenient play on words. But it came to the forefront of my mind as I sat to think about what it takes to reach that threshold in trading, or in life in general, where you actually gain positive steam towards a goal for which you have been fighting an uphill battle for what feels like forever. 

The analogy to climbing and descending a hill is not a bad one, except we're talking about a hill of unknown height on a foggy day. The battle up the hill is taking you on a challenge of unknown magnitude, for which there may be many pitfalls, but you take it anyway. If you're lucky enough to make it to the top to level ground, you can take a serious breather and celebrate, and start to make your descent on a path that is much more deterministic and relatively stress-free. It's this last part that people usually observe, and want to emulate you or start praising you for all your accomplishments, with little appreciation for what it took to get there.

One aspect of the aforementioned journey worth focusing on is the "unknown" factor. When trading or life challenges present themselves to you, the natural reaction is often to give up or pivot for most people. A huge number of traders don't make it for the simple reason that they gave up too soon, harkening images of the meme of the miner than gives up his digging right before hitting the stash of gems on the other side of a thin remaining wall of rock. I imagine a similar phenomenon occurs in other challenges such as achieving scientific breakthroughs or in one's weight loss journey. 

But what does it take to break free beyond this point beyond which we find the metaphorical peak of the mountain or precious metals on the other side of the wall? Aside from the technical hiking or mining skill it might take to achieve these feats, what it really takes is a drive to both persevere just when you think it's time to quit as well as a willingness to peer into the unknown. To me, it's clear that the metaphorical boundaries of achieving our dreams are largely artificially constrained by the mental walls we create. 

Going back to trading, we see the Unknown in things like the extent to which an uptrend may continue (often waaay beyond we expected), but we never take that willingness to dip our toes into the rally since our mentality is that we have no idea where this rally is going, so it's not even worth participating in it. Everything needs to be nice and cozy in our minds. The same is true with persevering with a trading strategy or habit in the first place. We give up at the first sign of weakness even though we know that there's substance to what we're doing. Instead of treating trading as a gradually improving set of statistical outcomes, we take each failure as a punch to the gut that invalidates us. 

This post has basically been a very long-winded way of saying that we must be willing to move beyond our comfort zone to achieve great things. If working with other people--especially in arriving at decisions--makes you comfortable, maybe trading in isolation is what you need to venture into in order to unlock the secrets to decision-making that will make you an independent thinker and doer. If having 3 trading monitors with 20 charts adds to your sense of being a "trader", but you're seeing no additional results, maybe trading on one screen with one chart is what you need to face your fears and see the light. Whatever it is, we need to first identify and then tackle our mental trading bottlenecks head on to break free to a place we didn't know existed, and to reap the rewards that lie beyond the thin wall that separates us from this place.