Are we doing are our best?

Are we doing are our best? – 21-11-2017
Over the weekend I had some nice company and we all spent two glorious days doing nothing but chilling and listening to music! Aah bliss! What a fantastic way to spend the day. Music, to me, is an enthralling experience, something that reaches into the very core of our being. I really feel for those who don’t have a musical ear. I think God has been unkind to them, robbing them of one of the greatest pleasures this life can give us!

During the course of some music video watching, one of the videos we played was a Yanni concert in Egypt, at the foot of the great pyramids. In this video, Yanni suddenly says I have a surprise for you and plays a clip of a friend of his who is part of the International Space Station. That person presents us with some breathtaking images from far away of our planet and says how, from far away, we are all really one. On the ground however, sadly, we are many. Yanni followed up by saying that we should all be thankful to those folks out there on the ISS as it required a special kind of human being to do what they are doing.

So in the midst of the video watching, it set me thinking. Those chaps out there on the Space Station are same like you and me in every way. Except in the way think, the way they believe of what is important, and what they must do about it. In contrast, we just exist, moving from day to day, taking things as they come or as they happen, hoping that eventually, it will all turn out OK somehow. If we are leading our lives that way, would we not do something quite similar in our trading and investing lives too? This is really the bane, then, the lackadaisical approach that most of us bring to the job of trading and investing. For many of us, this is our livelihood. Just think of it this way- do you really work that way at your office or in your business? Do you say, I am going to make an attempt and leave the rest of it to chance? Then why do we behave so inconsistently in the market?

As traders and investors, it is our own responsibility to be at our best at all times during our activity. We can be no different from those people on the Space Station who have almost zero room for error or indifferent behaviour. They have to be on the ball all the time, follow the procedure at all times, be alert and vigilant about themselves and their surroundings at all times. So do investors and traders. Realise that in the big world of the market, you are all alone, just as you are out there in space. If you are lost, there is no one to help you out.

Space station candidate undergo a rigorous process of training, preparing themselves for the job for many months. How many of us even think that we need to educate ourselves before we enter markets? Hardly anyone. Even those that do come in for some training are in such hurry to learn a couple of short cuts and off to the races for them! If they like the idea that is being shown and it is successful for the first few examples, then the trainer is a genius. If it doesn’t work out, off they go, in search of the next guy who can offer them the quick fix. How sad.

I often tell those who attend our training or come to us for advisory services that they should plan to make this a kind of a long term relational commitment. Education happens over time and can seldom be thrust down the throat. But modern day life has made whittled down everyone’s attention span and willingness to persist to minutes and hours rather than months and years. We live in the age of instant gratification and instant availability of the desired objects or objective. Little surprise that those expectations have also translated into the markets!

Slow down, think about what you are doing and more, how are you doing it? Are you giving it your best? Does it not deserve your best? Make the Space Station guy your role model. His life depends on his doing his best at all times. So does yours, The difference seems to lie in the fact that his training has made him understand this and we have not had any education and hence remain ignorant of it. Time to do something about it, don’t you think?