Week 2 of book summaries

Jason Capital — fuck Jobs

K-A-I-Z-E-N. Kaizen. Kaizen means a lifestyle, a philosophy, a total and utter commitment to consistent and never-ending improvement. Constant and never-ending improvement. It’s a focus on just getting a little bit better at the thing you’re working on every single day. You’re not trying to be a superstar tomorrow. You’re not trying to be a billionaire tomorrow. You just know over time. “If I just get a little bit better at what I’m doing every day, I just focus on this thing in front of me today, and I get just a little bit better at it today, over time, those little gains are going to add up into huge, huge transformations.”

What is a high-income skill? A high-income skill is a skill that you will always make a minimum of $10,000 a month or more with. It’s a skill you take to the marketplace, you take to businesses, you take to CEOs, you take to companies and agencies, you just take to the world out there, and it’s a skill that they need help with. They don’t wanna hire in-house for it. They wanna hire someone who’s good at the skill, and they pay big money for it, like one or two or three or five or ten thousand dollars a month, for you to just perform this one skill on your time from your laptop.

Copywriting — speaking — sales

Copywriting is the only high-income skill that is scalable. What that means is I can write words on my computer, publish them on a video or a web page, and then traffic hits that page, and a percentage of people who hit that page will give money directly to my bank account.

Every other high-income skill is one-to-one. Copywriting is the only skill that is one to many, and because it’s one to many, your income ceiling doesn’t fucking exist. It is the sky. You’re never trading time for hours, for dollars.

My goal for you is when you get an idea — because I know you’ve had ideas in the past, and I know you have some good ideas, but you haven’t acted on them fully, you’ve tried a little bit, or you hit that pain point, and then you give up — I want you to develop this action-taking habit, and the action-taking habit is really simple.

Tony Stark gets an idea. Eight seconds later, he’s already implementing it.
Sheep wait. Lions act. Fuck waiting. Take action.

There is an attractive girl. You like her
The minute you see someone you want to go to, you have to go. You start moving toward them. You have to go approach them within three seconds or less ’cause if you give yourself more than three seconds, you will undoubtedly talk yourself out of the opportunity that was put in front of you.

Better than the three-second rule, what we taught our guys and what was so successful, is they just trained themselves. Whenever they saw something they wanted, instead of waiting for their brains to come up with reasons why it was not going to work, why they shouldn’t do it, or all the bullshit limiting beliefs that they had, they just had to say, “Fuck it,” and they went. Right? “Fuck it,” and then you go.

An old lesson from personal development is that to become who you want to become, you have to temporarily become “not you” because that person you want to become is different from you.

Secrets of the billionaires:

The self-made billionaires that I interviewed get up on average at 5:30 a.m. with some variation to it.

Reading is, together with exercise, the activity that billionaires spend time on regularly. Almost all my interviewees named reading as one of the habits they follow daily.

Speed is important. Speed of action is a quality of most billionaires. They follow the motto “act now and think later”

Something my dad taught me was you go after one thing hard and do it till it’s done. Just focus until it’s there, until you’ve achieved what it is that you wanted to accomplish. I believed in that, and I do believe in that.

I think if you want to achieve something in business, the worst thing is a good salary. Because you don’t become rich with that, but also you have the guarantee. Most people give everything away for the safety. Safety meaning: to have a lifetime job. This is a dream of 99.9% of people.” So don’t trade your future for safety, it’s a bad trade.

We only have 35,000 days on this earth and then you’re gone, and no one gives a shit after that. You’re a little speck of germ in the whole universe. So it really doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks; it’s a matter of, did I completely fulfill every second of my life? It helps me stop doing a lot of things that aren’t really, really, really important. Sometimes I think, if I only had three months to live, how would I change my calendar? What projects would I do, what wouldn’t I do? It really helps me prioritize.

If you’re trying to do something extraordinary, you will be ridiculed.

I don’t think you’re successful in business unless you understand people. One of my favorite subjects during medical school was psychiatry. People say, “Oh, did you do accounting? Did you do finance?” And my answer is, “No, I didn’t. You can hire accountants, you can hire lawyers, you can hire professional people.” Business is all about people. How do you get them to do what you want them to do? How do you reward them? How do you make them feel good about themselves? How do you get them to accept the direction?

Not showing up to the opportunity can come extremely expensive. You may think, such opportunities never occur in your life. But think about it! How many opportunities have you missed in your life? How many opportunities have passed before your eyes that you haven’t noticed? How

many opportunities may exist right now that you are not aware of? Are you sure none of those could turn out to be a billion-dollar opportunity?

Most of my failures were failures to act.
FORESIGHT —See what’s in front of you and be able to say, here’s an opportunity.

Difference between a millionaire and a billionaire? Luck. Being in the right place at the right time. But you make your own luck through hard work, through perseverance, passion.”

Billionaires know how to handle risk and take risks with huge upside and low downside.

Where most people see a problem, billionaires see an opportunity in solving it. They use obstacles to their advantage.

Don’t expect success to appear at the very first try. You need to try over and over again and fail over and over again. And you need to do it right only once. Once you finally succeed, you become an “overnight success.”

There are lots of failures along the way; it’s part of the process. You can’t be successful without having failures. It’s not possible. The only people that don’t make mistakes are the people that don’t do anything. If you want to stay out of trouble, you can go and work for the government.”
“Success is continuing to be willing to fail.

“Never accept a no.” If you accept, you lose. When you hear “no,” don’t just accept. You need to find another way. Understand “no” as “maybe.”

There is a difference between a failure and the final defeat. You can only be defeated if you give up after a failure. Don’t do it. Don’t take the easy way out; instead — persevere. The difference between defeat and success is the thin line between giving up and continuing to move forward. In case you fall, don’t sacrifice your goal; just choose another way. If you failed once, try again until you succeed. As long as you don’t give up, you haven’t really failed.

Failure only happens when you give up. Everything else is just simply a pivot.
There is no success without suffering. You have to suffer to succeed.

“Execution is everything. You can be a professor at Harvard Business, but if you don’t have the execution, you will never succeed. People think a strategy or a market position is the most important thing for success, but I say no. That’s maybe 15%, 20%. Eighty percent of your success is execution, the ability to actually put your ideas into life, into reality.”

I always think, I took maximum risk in my life. Although, as time goes by, when you get older, everybody including myself wants to take less risk. It needs the sum of accumulated experience and intellect to understand how much risk you can actually take on. That’s what I call preparedness for the business.

The success of life can only be measured by the degree of happiness you reach.

You will have to fail many times before you succeed. So be willing to fail, but don’t give up; persevere and keep fighting! Don’t be afraid to be different. Do not conform. Your passion will enable you to work hard for many years on the way to your dreams and overcome all the obstacles.

Essence of Trading Psychology in One Skill

One of the fundamental lessons that I’ve learned and come to accept is that control in the markets is an illusion.

You might have:

A proven edge, An efficient risk and money management technique, Enough trading capital at your disposal to give you a fair chance, The best trading software at your disposal, A reliable broker with great commissions, …
but regardless of those advantages, if you are still engineering mediocrity for yourself, then some deep changes in the way you think need to be considered.

In its essence, trading is just a game of applying a model to the letter. Said this way, it surely seems simple. But, simple doesn’t mean easy! This is especially true when one trades for a living. And, as any real trader who does so will attest, this endeavor is a battle that is difficult to win.

What I’m saying is that if trading for a living is something you want to pursue with the least amount of stress possible, you have to work on making your trading process simple and straight forward. You have to give up the fun and thrill of subjective trading in favor of a more consistent and objective approach.

I’d rather not know anything… I’m better off that way. I am more calm, serene, I have more time for myself and my loved ones. And above all, my well-being doesn’t hang onto any market direction or trade outcome because I didn’t put much time and effort trying to figure out where they’re going or what an outcome will result in. My trading methodology and my expectations are in line with the way markets are: uncertain.

The only way to counteract that is through a systematic process that is not based on faith or personal conviction but an objective process that can be described mathematically and statistically.

“In its essence, trading is simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”

Trading would just be a game of applying a model to the letter. And we know empirically that a lot of people fail at doing such a simple and seemingly “easy” task. So there must be more to the story; there must be another *deeper* criteria that we’re not considering
While a proven edge and an efficient risk management technique are building blocks, psychology — an appropriate state of mind when trading — is what glues those blocks together!

When we adopt a similar approach, every winning or losing trades become data points. By this process of careful experimentation, as we keep trading, we discover more data around what works and what doesn’t.

Consider this: picture a guy walking in equilibrium on a rope over the Grand Canyons. What do you think is happening in that person’s mind?

I think the answer is clear: if the guy focuses on falling, in all likelihood, he is going to fall. If he focuses on reaching the end of the line as soon as possible, he also stands a greater chance of falling. However, if he focuses on the part that is in his control — staying present and focusing on the process of keeping his balance which he probably spent countless hours rehearsing — his action will become more faithful to his goals. Similarly, in trading, we all want to make x amount of money in the markets, but this is out of our control. You don’t get to decide what the markets ought to give you in each and every moment. Behaviors, by contrast, is something that you can control. They are the things you focus on in order to achieve your goals of earning x amount of money.

But it’s also important to acknowledge that you are never going to reliably get a specific amount that you decide upon — but your behaviors are going to help you get as close to it as possible. “If your focus is on money, you will never improve your results. If your focus is on improvement, you will get the money.” When I stopped thinking about the money and started focusing on my behavior, everything changed for me — my stress and anxiety levels went down, and my whole experience of trading changed for the better.

You control your entry, your exit, your risk level, your position size, etc., and your goal is to stick to your process in that regard. But the moment you shift your focus of attention from your process to the money (the need for or the lack thereof), you will begin to obsess over every single tick, and you will be inclined to check your positions every minute of the day.

“I’m proud of myself, I’ve been following my plan to the letter. Whatever the current results are, I will keep doing the right thing over what merely feels good.” As you can see, one mode of thinking is “money-oriented”, while the other is “process-oriented.” Which one do you think will fare the best results in the end? Which one is less stressful and makes trading a more pleasant enterprise?

if you are operating with a “money-oriented” mode of thinking, you are approaching this whole endeavor the wrong way.
When you trade, you have to empty your mind of any expectations you might be holding for yourself. That is the key to success in this field, and sadly, it is understood by few people.

But the thing is that to survive in this business, you have to pour love into what you’re doing — so much that money takes the second place in your mind. This is very important to understand because trading is not like any other field where success is proportional to the amount of work you commit to it. Success in trading is proportional to how much you are willing to let go of your attachment to, and need for, money, success, but also certainty, comfort, etc..

Nothing worthwhile can be achieved in the markets without undergoing this fundamental shift in approach. This doesn’t mean that you give up your intention to create that which you desire, rather you give up the attachment to the result or the money. The moment you do that, and you combine it with your intention and focus, the money will come, as a by-product. Without detachment, we are prisoners of helplessness, hopelessness, despair, fear, anxiety, stress, trivial concerns, quiet desperation, all of which are the distinctive features of the unprofitable trader. “If your happiness rests upon what you expect from trading, you are doomed.”

Pursue excellence, ignore success, and above all don’t take your winners and losers too seriously. If you do that, I promise you, your experience of trading will be much more enjoyable and you’ll obtain far better results.

“The highest form of human intelligence is the ability to observe yourself without judging yourself. In essence, this is mindfulness.” Mindfulness is the ability to observe yourself in a non-judgmental way, therefore, effectively it is the guardian of the mind.

“Awareness is like the sun. When it shines on things, they are transformed.”

how do you train your mind to gain awareness of your thoughts and emotions as they are arising? To these questions, there is one simple answer: mindfulness!

In its essence, the word mindfulness means ‘to remember the present moment,’ and the practice, in a nutshell, is one of paying non-judgmental attention to that specific moment.

When you practice being present — not half present but fully present — you bring in all of you, even for a few seconds at a time, but certainly as much as you can. And when you do this in trading, it taps you into what you need most at the moment, what you need to know, and what you need to do, rather than mindlessly act on a feeling. “The mind is everything. How you use it determines your reality.”

Mindfulness is the awareness that arises from paying attention on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgmentally.

In essence, what you are doing is that, with every thought that comes into your awareness, you are learning to let go, which starts with letting be, and you are strengthening your ability to do so.