D.T.F.W!!! - Part 2

Do the fucking work. That's what I said Do the fucking work. Last week we talked about do the fucking work, DTFW. This week, we're going to continue our discussion and we're gonna move on to do the fucking work part two. So what is the definition of the work this week? Last week do the fucking work was about the time you spend every day devoted to just yourself, to improve yourself in all the domains, to better put yourself in a place that you could have it all that you could live with contentment, and joy in every area of your life. Today, we're going to go to the next version of the work and this version of the work is the time that you devote every day to becoming a master in your field or a master of a skill. So for most of us, this is gonna get into our career. If we're young, this might get into our hobby or passion. But it's something that we're committed to becoming great at.

Now, there's two ways to create mastery. The first is you do the fucking work. Many people call it the 10,000 hour rule. We'll talk about this today. The second is you hire a great coach, or you work with a great mentor. The set out the first part, let's talk about the 10,000 hour rule. There's a few different books on this that are excellent. The most famous book is Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell and he was the first one that kind of popularized this concept of the 10,000 hour rule. It's based off the research of Anders Ericsson from Florida State who did a bunch of research, looking at great athletes, great musicians, great artists and what made somebody become massively successful versus somebody who was successful versus somebody who was okay and the big part that Malcolm Gladwell focuses on, which is accurate, is the 10,000 hour rule. It basically says that to become a master, you have to put in 10,000 hours of work and notice this next paragraph. The research suggests that once a musician, this is Manders, Erickson studying musicians, that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school. The thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard she works. That's it. In other words, it's do the fucking work. We see this even in athletics, where we tend to think in athletics, it's going to be determined by the person who's the tallest, the person who's the strongest, the person who's the fastest and there's no doubt genetics play a big role. But it comes down to the work. You go through and you look at the top athletes in any sport, and they work their ass off. Now, they worked hard ass off harder than anybody and this is why they have success. Now one interesting thing. I love studying prodigies. I was actually gonna include it in here and I forgot but I do I have a picture a bunch of pictures kind of like a collage put together of famous athletes and there were is Barry Bonds, Kobe Bryant, Peyton Manning, Eli Manning, Patrick Mahomes, Steph Curry, Klay, Thompson, Christian McCaffrey. We can go down the line, and we and it's all these top athletes and what's very interesting, as I showed this picture, and I asked people, I said, what did they all have in common? And people looked at it and he said, Well, you know, maybe they're all great athletes. You know, maybe they all won championships, which is not accurate. Many of them have. So they're looking for the commonality, but they really struggle. I step back and show them the commonality that they have is they're all the sons of pro athletes. They're all sons of pro athletes.

Now, there's another excellent book called bounce. It's similar to outliers and in the book bounce, one of the things he talks about is that when you look at prodigies people have this belief that prodigies are special, that they have a talent that other people do not and he actually debunks this myth. He says it's not true. What prodigies having go for them is that they start earlier, you could go look at Mozart's early symphonies. So they're not very good when he was a 14 year old writing him, here's a 10 year old 12 to 14 year old, but other people weren't doing this till years later and so this is one of the key elements is it's not that they're more talented, it's that they start earlier. Hold that thought. So we know we need to do the fucking work. One of things we often talk about it with our students is one of the keys to being successful is to stop fucking lying. Stop looking like, what what does this mean? This means that what's the opposite of lying? Telling the truth. Stop fucking lying and start telling the truth. Well, one of the reasons we talk about this is that people have a story, they have excuses for why they're not successful or why things don't work out. But inevitably, it always comes back to that they don't do the work. That's what it comes down to. They have an excuse for why they didn't do the work. But the bottom line is they do not do the work. So they don't get the success that they hoped for. But rather than own it, they lie about it. They lie about the excuses that held them back. 

All right. So we have the 10,000 hour rule, we have to do the fucking work. Now we move to the second part and the second part is hiring a great coach are working with a great mentor. So and I Anders Ericsson we talked about he described in a 1993 paper, the role of deliberate practice with the success of violin students. As Gladwell noted, they found it took a remarkable amount of time of such practice 10 years worth or 10,000 hours to gain mastery. But what Gladwell left out was the role of deliberate practice, meaning the work under the guidance of a teacher. What works best for that, said Erickson, is her students to receive personal instruction with a teacher who could assess them individually and determine what would be the next step to actually develop and improve. Otherwise students might stall out, despite hours of practice. Said another way, Erickson said that you could go put in 10,000 hours and it wouldn't actually guarantee you'd be a success. Because if you put in 10,000, substandard hours, 10,000 aimless hours, you're not going to get where you want to go. Now, let's talk about this for a few moments. So here's some examples. I played basketball growing up and I also play golf and here's a good example. When you go see typical basketball players, when they practice, what do they do? They go to the court, they dribble around a little bit, they shoot, they shoot, they might shoot some three pointers, they might drill the line a little bit, shoot some jump shots off the dribble, they might go in and shoot a layup. And they'll go spend an hour, two hours, three hours out on the court, shooting and dribbling. Well, they're practicing, but they're not practicing deliberately. They're not walking out on the court with a specific objective, to work out a specific skill. Now rocking out saying today, we're going to work on ball handling. And we're going to work with one ball and two balls, we're going to work stationary, we're going to walk off work off the dribble, we're going to have somebody guard me in everything we do today is derived about how I can be a better ball handler, bringing the ball off the floor, or how you can be a better ball handler to get by my man and get to the rim. Deliberate practice working on one skill and related drills.

Think about a golfer. Why golfers never going to the range just like a lot of basketball players never go shoot around. So first of all, just shooting around or going to the range makes you better than people that just play. But even if you look at people that go to the range, they get a bucket of balls, and they go out and they might hit a couple seven irons and then they go to the driver and they hit the driver and then they go think about it. They didn't practice putting maybe you're putting green for a little bit. They didn't practice chipping. They didn't hit every club in their bag. They did hit their clubs, from a sand trap or from a deep rough or from a terrible Y, they didn't hit all five irons They're trying to fade into a green. They're just hitting balls with no rhyme or reason they don't have deliberate practice. So, you go through and you look at most golfers, you look at most basketball players, you look at most traders, they get to a level of skill, and they stall and why do they stall, because their habits don't support them being any better. So this is where they could spend lots of time playing golf. I know people like my dad used to be this way. I know people are playing golf every day, they paid off 5, 6, 7 days a week, sometimes multiple times in a day, 36 holes, and they don't get any better. Why? Because they never go to the range and they don't go to the range of their plan. They don't address the holes in their game, they don't work on specific skills. So ironically, trading, we need to do the same thing. This is why simulators are great. This is why back tests are great. Because we can identify a specific skill, we can focus on a specific setup, a specific pattern is specific money names or rules, a specific exit technique and we could do it again and again and again and again, this is something I do a lot of, I'll say, okay, tonight, I'm just going to look at breakouts and I'm going to only take breakouts, and I'm going to take them and I'm going to use this specific pattern, this specific trade management technique, and this is all good to do and I'm gonna change the timeframe, I'm gonna change the product, I'm going to change the asset class, and I'm gonna go through one after the other after the other after the other and then I'm going to record my results, I'm going to take time to actually record what I see. I'm going to take screenshots of the trades, I'm gonna take him before him and take him after by the simulator, I'm going to know what's coming before and we're looking at it after and being very specific about the skill, not the pattern about that area of my training game that I'm trying to address. Other trader just sit down in a chair and trade, it's like going to the golf course, just going out your bag and go into the first tee, you're only going to get to a certain level, and you're not going to be outstanding.

Now, when we work with a teacher, or we work with a mentor, we can buy our learning curves. So everybody wants to do things on the cheap and the great thing is in the internet, you can, there's all kinds of great information on the internet and could you become a great trader based off of things on the internet? Yeah, you could. But it would take a long ass time. A lot of trial and error, a lot having to read and read and read and different sources have to sort through what's bullshit, and what's good and you have to think about how you put all of this together. How do you put it all together into a plan that works for you? It's gonna take a long ass time. One of the interesting things is people don't consider the value of their time. I remember my aunt, my dad used to make fun of my aunt, because my aunt was very cheap. She would drive across town to save $10 on a purchase, or she buy something, see it on sale somewhere else, you drive back to the store or return it, drive across town and buy another thing on sale. She saved 10 or $15 and my dad, it'd be like, what did that cost you in gas just to drive across town and you spent three hours doing all this. So at your job, you make $25 an hour, you spent three hours doing this and you spent $20 in gas, you spent $75 of your time $20 of your actual gas money. That's $95 that you put towards this to save $10, fucking stupid. People do this all the time.

This happens in trading. Well, I'm not going to pay for a course I'm going to figure it out on my own. Why would I pay $1,500 or $3,000 for a class? I can just do this on my own? Yes, you can. But how long is it going to take you? How much are you willing to lose in your trades? How much opportunity costs are you going to waste now? So that three years from now, five years from now you can figure it out. You can engage with somebody who can put you in the right path and get you there quickly. That's why you do it. Now I want to I want to offer something else up here. When you go and we look at all those athletes that I mentioned, and I said the thing they have in common is their dads are all professional athletes. Some cases their mothers were Victor Wembayama, who's now the hot hot player, or maybe potentially the Rookie of the Year. He's in a battle with Chet Holmgren, by the way in the NBA.  Okay, let's look at both of them. Victor Wembayamas mother is a phenomenal basketball player. She was a great pro ball. Here's her son coming along. Chet Holmgren father was a really good college basketball player at the University of Minnesota. Here we go, starting to see a pattern. Okay, so in all those cases, their fathers already did it. So what did this mean for them, this means they started earlier, because their dad already did it. They had a mentor, which was their father and he had other mentors and other coaches, because they were around some of the greatest coaches in the world, on the teams that their fathers played on. Their father could also introduce them bring in some of the top trainers in the world, some of the top AAU coaches put them in the top high schools, the top AAU programs, so we're surrounded by the best of the best. So they start earlier, they're surrounded by the best of the best and of course, a lot of cases, they also inherit the genetic ability of their parents and all this comes together and you see how great they are.

Now, let's bring us into some other stories. I saw a friend of mine in Miami this week and his story is a great story. So him and his brother, they went to South Beach in spring break in the 80s and they went to this hotel called the Clevelander and they saw this place and they saw like this is a potential goldmine, during college and spring break. They went back to their parents. They told her parents, we want to buy this hotel. Your parents worked out to give them a loan for $175,000 and he bought the Cleveland or hotel and bar. They then sold this in the late 2000s for $85 million. They paid $175,000 for it. They made money all those years owning it and they sold it for 85 million. Okay it's an unbelievable story. But what's funny is when you dig deeper Guess what? Their father was a bar owner. He owned a bar the whole time they were growing up and when they were in high school, he bought a hotel in Jamaica and the family moved to Jamaica, from Chicago. They moved to Jamaica, and they ran his hotel and they had a bar and so forth. So when it's not just this craziness of college kids buying a bar hotel, these college kids have grown up in a bar. They grown up in a hotel, they grew up with a father that this is what they did, they were prodigies, it's no wonder they succeeded. The most successful student that I've ever trained personally, his dad was a trader at the Chicago Board of Trade. He started working at the exchange at 14. He went to college, he sought me out and basically hired himself. He sent me a letter said, I've watched you trade for years. I really admire you, I would do anything to work for you. I work for free and I'll be there on Tuesday to start and I was like, what was this dude thinking he's hired himself. But I hired him and then I trained him and so he learned from his father, he learned from me and then he worked really hard and he grew up. He's probably the top natural gas trader in the United States. incredibly successful. Everything that people dream about. He has, multiple houses, big gas houses, car collection, private jet. Does whatever he wants. Guys had incredible success. But I was talking to him recently 2023. He said his typical day we got up at 4am and started went right to the trading desk and he traded till 4pm. It's 12 hours a day. Now he's not trade all those times, but he's around. He's on the desk. He's available for 12 hours. Okay, I asked him. How many days off did you take last year he said two. He got married last year. He went on a honeymoon and he only took a long weekend. He took two days off. Okay, so let's just say he worked 50 hours a week, and he didn't take any weeks off. That's 52 weeks. That's 2600 hours in a year that he's training. Now he's been trading natural gas specifically for 15 years, this doesn't count the time he spent before, which he spent about another six years working for me in other areas and other products. Okay, so he's been doing natural gas alone for 15 years, that's 39,000 hours  that he has trading natural gas, intensely and deliberately.

No wonder he's the best. No wonder he's the best. My own story, I started at 14, my dad included me my dad was learning how to trade he included me, I started working at the Chicago Board of Trade at 17 and I started working for one of the top traders at the exchange at 18. I got to watch him and all the other guys around and how they traded when I was 18. So and then I went to DePaul full time at night, and of getting a finance degree and then I went to IIT and I took technical analysis classes in between when I worked and when I had night class and I read every book I could, and I poured myself completely into it and I've done that since. So I'm sharing this with you because here's one of the problems of trading. In basketball, if you went out and you never played, and you try to go out and play with a bunch of elite players, it will be obvious you had no idea what the hell you're doing, you'd get destroyed. If I walked you in to surgery, and said, we're going to do open heart surgery today go for it, it'd be obvious you didn't know what the hell you were doing. Any other field, it's obvious that you either have mastery or you don't. Trade is different. This is important trading is different. Because trading is one of the very few things in life that you can do that you could sit down at an Interactive Brokers screen or whatever broker you use, you could sit down next to me or next to Paul Tudor Jones, or next to whoever you want to pick the best traders in the world and we're all going to do the same thing.

We're going to place an order in a certain way, that order is going to get executed and we're in and it's more like a lottery pick or like a buying a lottery ticket once we buy it, it can work. You can make a lot of money on this trade, even though you have no idea what you're doing and that is a problem. Because it gives false illusion about your possibility of success. It gives false hope and this is why if you make money to start with, it's a big, big problem. One of the worst things that can happen for a trader is to start off being successful, when they don't know what they're doing. This sets them up to get slammed because now they think it's easy and it's not easy. Over time, they'll give it back, I saw this in my father, my father made $360,000 in 1983 training soybeans at $100 around turn, and commissions. Insane commissions. He did this part time, he made more money that year than he ever made in a very successful aviation business and in his mind, that was it. That was what was going to take him to multi-millions. But it was a trap and so he went from being a multimillionaire to being broke in four years. Less than four years, because he didn't know what he was doing.

Okay, so it gives you this false hope. Because you can come in and act like you know what you're doing when you don't, and you can have a shot. But over time, you're gonna get killed. Just like walking into Vegas and betting it all black, you could bet on black, and you might win. But if you win, and you keep betting you can get ground down by the house. This message could sound quite discouraging I get this. Let's pull back and talk about what we can do. How can you be successful? Well, we know that you can accelerate your learning curves by hiring a great mentor or hiring a great coach. You're going to have to do the work one way or the other. If anybody's telling you otherwise, they're lying to you. You're going to have to do the work. But what we do that really helps is we set up support services and we have classes where we teach you and then we have Support Services, we have a, like a spreadsheet that comes out every day that shows the trade candidates and our advisory service, you can see these trades that you've learned in class and you can see the signals come through and you can see what we say about it and then you can do those trades with us and then by trading these trades with us, you can see them work or not work and you can hear us talk about why they worked or why they didn't work. And this whole process gets you in the ballgame. Essentially, what you're doing is you're leaning on our work, you're leaning in our experience, in a combination of you doing your version, your end of the work. And working with us will accelerate it for you so you can be successful quickly and then you can keep learning as you have success.

The bottom line is whatever it is you want in life, you got to do the fucking work. That's it. There's no other way around it and then you want to try and accelerate that by getting yourself around the best people, people that you believe in, people that you trust. Every Tuesday, I come to you with a message like this, where I'm helping you learn how to take your trading to the elite level and today, it's pretty simple. Get a great coach and do the fucking work. I'll see you next week.