The Fifth Factor For a Fantastic F*@cking Life!!

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You can see here we had faith, family, fitness, and finances, and number five is fun.

What is the definition of fun? The definition of fun is something that provides mirth, I have no idea what mirth means, or amusement, and/or enjoyment, or look what I highlighted, playfulness, the ability to be playful, the ability to enjoy the moment. The other four areas are all critically important. Being strong in our faith, huge help. Being strong in our family, huge help. Being strong in our fitness, huge help, and being strong in our finances.

Now, all four of those have things that they will give us. But if we're being real honest, we also have to give to all for of them. We have to give, we have to surrender, we have to make time for our faith. We have to give time, we have to give energy, thought, and love to our family. We certainly know when it comes to fitness, we need to make decisions. We need to do hard things. We need to say no to certain things, and yes to other things. We need to push ourselves through pain, eat things we don't want to eat, say no to things we don't want to eat. Finances, we need to take the time to create a plan and execute the plan. All four of these take work. They have great, great benefits, but they take work.

Let's talk about fun. When you look at people that kind of fall into camps, you have one camp that everything they do is fun, and they have nothing of value or substance in their life. They just pursue fun, and they might have fun in the moment. But their lives tend to be shallow and empty. Then we have the other group, which is kind of that puritanical style from the back from the pilgrims. Where they have that Puritan work ethic and they work and they work and they work and they work and they work. They basically have a belief, there is no time for fun. There is no place for fun. There is serious business going on right now, and we need to focus. So you have one camp that all they do is have fun, and you have another camp that didn't have any fun. Well, like a lot of things in life, we need to strike a happy balance.

What are you doing all this for if you're not having any fun? We should do something every day that is fun. It could be a little thing. It could be a big thing. It could be tickling your daughter when you come home. It could be listening to some fun music. It could be going for a five minute walk. It could be just hanging out and kissing your wife. I don't know what it is for you. Could be watching your favorite Netflix show. Nothing wrong with watching TV, just do it when it's fun. But what is it that you do for fun?

I want you to realize for a second if you don't have any fun in your life, you're communicating to yourself a mentality of scarcity, and this is the biggest thing we need to avoid. We need to avoid this mental frame of scarcity because it bleeds over every aspect of our life. Scarcity makes us scared in our faith. Scarcity has us treat our loved ones differently. Scarcity has us avoid working out and avoid doing things to take care of ourselves because we're afraid we don't have the time we don't have the money. Scarcity in our finances. We hoard. We do it ourselves. We don't farm out to people who are better than we are. We think everything is limited. We cut off the flow of blessings to us because we clearly communicate that if something comes to us, it is not getting out, and this happens in fun. When we don't have fun, we're communicating scarcity. We communicate we don't think we're worthy of it. We don't think there's enough time that we will be hurt in some way if we just have fun.

Trading is a very difficult profession, you're going to emotionally get the shit beat out of you. What are you going to do to have fun? Now, I studied under a coach who was who's famous for this book. It's called The Now Habit. This is Dr. Neil Fiore and Dr. Fiore did a PhD in procrastination. Literally. Initially he examined PhD students, and what he was working on his PhD one of the things he noticed is that the majority of PhD students never got their PhDs done. They had the time. They didn't have a full time job, but they just farted around every day and didn't get anything done.

He started to study why is this the case? He started to create strategies to help us be effective, to help us avoid procrastination and get shit done. The reason I'm sharing this with you is one of the key strategies that he taught me is, I did a Facebook live on this yesterday, he said you can't have your pudding if you don't eat your meat. It's what our grandma used to tell us, "you cannot have your dessert unless you eat your food first." You don't get dessert first. You have to eat your food first. Why did grandma do that? Well, she wanted you to work and get into things you needed in order to have the thing you wanted, the cake, the pudding.

What we want to do is we actually want to take the way we set our calendar, and we want to invert it. The majority of you when you do your calendar, if you do a calendar at all, the first thing you do is you put on all your meetings and all the things you need to get done, and then everything else fills in around it. What I encourage you to do is to take these five F's, all five of them, and put them in the calendar first. Put in your faith time. The time to worship, your time to pray, your time to meditate, your time to journal. Put in the time with your family, the time with your spouse, the time with your kids. Put in the time to take care of yourself, put in your workouts. Put in your finances. Take the time to put in your calendar, the meetings, block it out as a meeting the time you need to update your accounts, reconcile your accounts, go over your goals, allocate your savings, reevaluate your investments, and do that twice a month, once a week, something like that. The last one is fun. Put the fun in your calendar, plan a dinner with your friends, plan a lunch with a good friend. Plan an afternoon on a Saturday to go to a baseball game or to take your family to a park or to go to museum or go see a stupid movie. Plan a date night, an amazing date night with your wife on a Thursday night. I don't know what it is for you. But all of these things are fun.

Then what we do is once we plan the things that are fun, every day we should have something we look forward to every single day. We don't want to waste a single day without living in our mission, without having some fun. Then what we do is we link our work to our fun. Every time you have something fun coming, you have to work before you go to do the fun thing, if you're going to have lunch with a friend at 12 o'clock. Then you set up a two hour work block or a one hour work block or something right before 12 o'clock. You work on that thing that you really need to work on, and then you leave it and go to lunch with your friend.

One of the things that Dr. Fiore taught me is that when we can do this we actually program our subconscious mind in our subconscious mind goes to work, solving our problems while we're at lunch with our friend. Think about that. Our subconscious mind is working while we're having fun. Then when we come back or maybe the midst of lunch, all of a sudden like, wow, I got this idea. It's amazing. Yeah, it is amazing because you set your subconscious mind up to win, and then not only that, you're setting up this association. You're setting up the association where work equals fun. Work equals fun. If you don't have fun, you're going to be dreary. You're going to procrastinate, you're going to resist, and then when you do, instead of going to lunch with your friend that you remember, for the next month, as you joke about old times, or talk about new things you're going to do, what are you going to do instead? You're gonna go off to the bathroom, and procrastinate, as you scroll through Facebook, or you scroll through your emails, or you go online and look up something. Your mind is going to find a way to reject what you're doing to create space for itself, or you're gonna get sick, and then you have a legitimate reason that you can stay in bed and nobody will bother you. The reality is not really sick, you've set yourself up to be sick because you're trying to escape your work. So as traders want to have something fun every day that we do, it gets us looking forward to our day, and we have great days whether we make money or we lose money. Our day should not be run by our p&l. Our day should be run by our beliefs, by our actions, by our mission.

For some of you, when you start to watch this, you're like, "I don't even know if I want to watch this. This seems kind of ridiculous. He's talking about fun." Yeah, I'm talking about fun, and what I want you to realize is you having fun is a vital aspect of you having a f*@cking fantastic life. Don't feel guilty, don't apologize. Embrace it. Play with it. Enjoy it. These are all useful frames, useful beliefs that will help you not only make more money trading, but be happier, and there's a self feeding cycle. The happier you are, the more money you're going to make. The more money you're going to make, the happier you are, it will build on itself. Trust me on this. Have a great week. I'll see you next Tuesday. When I share with you another Trader Tip Tuesday where I share key insights to help you perform at an elite level. God bless and have a great week. Bye.