Discipline Trading Quotes

Essentialists see trade-offs as an inherent part of life, not as an inherently negative part of life. Instead of asking, “What do I have to give up?” they ask, “What do I want to go big on?

Solitude: it's become my trade. As it requires a certain discipline, it's a condition I try to perfect. And yet it plagues me, it weighs on me in spite of my knowing it so well.

Trading In The Zone – Master the Market With Confidence, Discipline and a Winning Attitude” by Mark Douglas, you would agree with me that the market is just unpredictable.

how you remain disciplined and objective in the market that matters most. Strict compliance with rules would help to free you from unexpected pains resulting from losses.

Markets need a fresh supply of losers just as builders of the ancient pyramids needed a fresh supply of slaves. Losers bring money into the markets, which is necessary for the prosperity of the trading industry.

Being simply “better than average” is not good enough. You have to be head and shoulders above the crowd to win a minus-sum game.

a greater probability of one thing happening over another. In a sense, technical analysis allows you

An astute trader aims to enter the market during quiet times and take profits during wild times.

The hard, cold reality of trading is that every trade has an uncertain outcome.

Only after a writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced workers said, "It is the trade entering his body." The art must enter the body, too.

From the family, through the school and religious institutions, the mass media, to the factory and finally trade union and "revolutionary" party, capitalist society conspires to foster obedience, hierarchy, the work ethic, and authoritarian discipline in the working class as a whole; indeed, in many of its "emancipatory" movements as well.

I AM A CONSISTENT WINNER BECAUSE: 1. I objectively identify my edges. 2. I predefine the risk of every trade. 3. I completely accept the risk or I am willing to let go of the trade. 4. I act on my edges without reservation or hesitation. 5. I pay myself as the market makes money available to me. 6. I continually monitor my susceptibility for making errors. 7. I understand the absolute necessity of these principles of consistent success and, therefore, I never violate them.

Learning to accept the risk is a trading skill—the most important skill you can learn.

the typical trader wants to be right on every single trade. He is desperately

So far, the only people who've made money from trading systems are their sellers.

We have to be careful about what we project out into the future, because nothing else has the potential to create more unhappiness and emotional misery than an unfulfilled expectation.

The answer is to draw a line between a businessman's risk and a loss. As traders, we always take businessman's risks, but we may never take a loss greater than this predetermined risk.

Essentialists are powerful observers and listeners. Knowing that the reality of trade-offs means they can’t possibly pay attention to everything, they listen deliberately for what is not being explicitly stated. They read between the lines.

A probabilistic mind-set pertaining to trading consists of five fundamental truths. 1. Anything can happen. 2. You don’t need to know what is going to happen next in order to make money. 3. There is a random distribution between wins and losses for any given set of variables that define an edge. 4. An edge is nothing more than an indication of a higher probability of one thing happening over another. 5. Every moment in the market is unique.

Remember our definition of a winning attitude: a positive expectation of your efforts with an acceptance that whatever results you get are a perfect reflection of your level of development and what you need to learn to do better.

It is hard enough to know what the market is going to do; if you don't know what you are going to do, the game is lost.

To help ensure success, practice defensive money management. A good trader watches his capital as carefully as a professional scuba diver watches his air supply.

We have largely traded wisdom for information, depth for breadth. We want to microwave maturity.

Most traders have absolutely no concept of what it means to be a risk-taker in the way a successful trader thinks about risk. The best traders not only take the risk, they have also learned to accept and embrace that risk. There is a huge psychological gap between assuming you are a risk-taker because you put on trades and fully accepting the risks inherent in each trade. When you fully accept the risks, it will have profound implications on your bottom-line performance.

Creating an essential intent is hard. It takes courage, insight, and foresight to see which activities and efforts will add up to your single highest point of contribution. It takes asking tough questions, making real trade-offs, and exercising serious discipline to cut out the competing priorities that distract us from our true intention. Yet it is worth the effort because only with real clarity of purpose can people, teams, and organisations fully mobilise and achieve something truly excellent.

Two ideas are opposed — not concepts or abstractions, but Ideas which were in the blood of men before they were formulated by the minds of men. The Resurgence of Authority stands opposed to the Rule of Money; Order to Social Chaos, Hierarchy to Equality, socio-economico-political Stability to constant Flux; glad assumption of Duties to whining for Rights; Socialism to Capitalism, ethically, economically, politically; the Rebirth of Religion to Materialism; Fertility to Sterility; the spirit of Heroism to the spirit of Trade; the principle of Responsibility to Parliamentarism; the idea of Polarity of Man and Woman to Feminism; the idea of the individual task to the ideal of ‘happiness’; Discipline to Propaganda-compulsion; the higher unities of family, society, State to social atomism; Marriage to the Communistic ideal of free love; economic self-sufficiency to senseless trade as an end in itself; the inner imperative to Rationalism.

To win in the markets, we need to master three essential components of trading: sound psychology, a logical trading system, and an effective risk management plan.

A strategic position is not sustainable unless there are trade-offs with other positions.

When you learn the trading skill of risk acceptance, the market will not be able to generate information that you define or interpret as painful.

Trade-offs are not something to be ignored or decried. They are something to be embraced and made deliberately, strategically, and thoughtfully.

Unless you learn to completely accept the possibility of an uncertain outcome, you will try either consciously or unconsciously to avoid any possibility you define as painful.

However, market analysis is not the path to consistent results. It will not solve the trading problems created by lack of confidence, lack of discipline, or improper focus.

This lack of support is not simply an absence of encouragement. It can be as deep as the outright denial of some particular way in which we want to express ourselves.

There are good trading systems out there, but they have to be monitored and adjusted using individual judgment. You have to stay on the ball—you cannot abdicate responsibility for your success to a mechanical system.

I discovered that you can’t train people how to trade by just imparting knowledge. The key to trading success is emotional discipline. Making money has nothing to do with intelligence. Think of all the bright people that choose careers on Wall Street. If intelligence were the key, there would be a lot more people making money trading.

People trade for many reasons—some rational and many irrational. Trading offers an opportunity to make a lot of money in a hurry. Money symbolizes freedom to many people, even though they often don't know what to do with it.

Adam Smith FRSE (baptised June 5, 1723 O.S. / June 16 N.S. – July 17, 1790) was a Scottish moral philosopher and a pioneering political economist. He is also the founder of economics. One of the key figures of the intellectual movement known as the Scottish Enlightenment, he is known primarily as the author of two treatises: The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). The latter was one of the earliest attempts to systematically study the historical development of industry and commerce in Europe, as well as a sustained attack on the doctrines of mercantilism. Smith's work helped to create the modern academic discipline of economics and provided one of the best-known intellectual rationales for free trade, capitalism, and libertarianism. Adam Smith is now depicted on the back of the Bank of England £20 note. Source: Wikipedia

When you learn the trading skill of risk acceptance, the market will not be able to generate information that you define or interpret as painful. If the information the market generates doesn’t have the potential to cause you emotional pain, there’s nothing to avoid. It is just information, telling you what the possibilities are. This is called an objective perspective—one that is not skewed or distorted by what you are afraid is going to happen or not happen.

Jim Collins, the author of the business classic Good to Great, was once told by Peter Drucker that he could either build a great company or build great ideas but not both. Jim chose ideas. As a result of this trade-off there are still only three full-time employees in his company, yet his ideas have reached tens of millions of people through his writing.8

Why do most traders lose and wash out of the markets? Emotional and mindless trading are big reasons, but there is another. Markets are actually set up so that most traders must lose money. The trading industry slowly kills traders with commissions and slippage.

So we introduced a token system.9 The children were given ten tokens at the beginning of the week. These could each be traded in for either thirty minutes of screen time or fifty cents at the end of the week, adding up to $5 or five hours of screen time a week. If a child read a book for thirty minutes, he or she would earn an additional token, which could also be traded in for screen time or for money. The results were incredible: overnight, screen time went down 90 per cent, reading went up by the same amount, and the overall effort we had to put into policing the system went way, way down. In other words, non-essential activity dramatically decreased and essential activity dramatically increased. Once

consistency is a state of mind that, once achieved, won’t allow you to “be” any other way.

The unseen enemy is always the most fearsome.” —George R. R. Martin, A Clash of Kings

Use limit orders almost exclusively—except when placing stops. Be careful on what tools you spend money: there are no magic solutions. Success cannot be bought, only earned.

Try to change who you are and you will fight yourself all the way and then wonder, amidst the resistance, why you lack discipline. We

Everyone who trades ends up learning something about the markets; very few people who trade ever learn the attitudes that are absolutely essential to becoming a consistent winner.

How do we remain disciplined, focused, and confident in the face of constant uncertainty?

The New Sell & Sell Short: How to Take Profits, Cut Losses, and Benefit from Price Declines (John Wiley & Sons, 2011).

If you have to win, if you have to be right, if you can’t lose or can’t be wrong, you will cause yourself to define and perceive categories of market information as painful.

you asked me to distill trading down to its simplest form, I would say that it is a pattern recognition numbers game.

Learning to accept the risk is a trading skill—the most important skill you can learn. Yet

They manage our perception and interpretation of environmental information in a way that is consistent with what we believe.

The fact is that if traders really believed that anything could happen at any time, there would be considerably fewer losers and more consistent winners.

The chart doesn’t betray you. Your ego does. — The Chart Is the Mirror

The public wants gurus, and new gurus will come. As an intelligent trader, you must realize that in the long run, no guru is going to make you rich. You have to work on that yourself.

Taking responsibility means acknowledging and accepting, at the deepest part of your identity, that you—not the market—are completely responsible for your success or failure as a trader.

Thus Marx begins his attack on the liberal concept of freedom. The freedom of the market is not freedom at all. It is a fetishistic illusion. Under capitalism, individuals surrender to the discipline of abstract forces (such as the hidden hand of the market made much of by Adam Smith) that effectively govern their relations and choices. I can make something beautiful and take it to market, but if I don’t manage to exchange it then it has no value. Furthermore, I won’t have enough money to buy commodities to live. Market forces, which none of us individually control, regulate us. And part of what Marx wants to do in Capital is talk about this regulatory power that occurs even “in the midst of the accidental and ever-fluctuating exchange relations between the products.” Supply and demand fluctuations generate price fluctuations around some norm but cannot explain why a pair of shoes on average trades for four shirts. Within all the confusions of the marketplace, “the labour-time socially necessary to produce [commodities] asserts itself as a regulative law of nature. In the same way, the law of gravity asserts itself when a person’s house collapses on top of him” (168). This parallel between gravity and value is interesting: both are relations and not things, and both have to be conceptualized as immaterial but objective.

The opium trade produced a rationale for the Christian presence in China, turning the country into a depraved mass of opium sots to be disciplined and improved by salvation-hungry missionaries.

This book is an essay in what is derogatorily called "literary economics," as opposed to mathematical economics, econometrics, or (embracing them both) the "new economic history." A man does what he can, and in the more elegant - one is tempted to say "fancier" - techniques I am, as one who received his formation in the 1930s, untutored. A colleague has offered to provide a mathematical model to decorate the work. It might be useful to some readers, but not to me. Catastrophe mathematics, dealing with such events as falling off a height, is a new branch of the discipline, I am told, which has yet to demonstrate its rigor or usefulness. I had better wait. Econometricians among my friends tell me that rare events such as panics cannot be dealt with by the normal techniques of regression, but have to be introduced exogenously as "dummy variables." The real choice open to me was whether to follow relatively simple statistical procedures, with an abundance of charts and tables, or not. In the event, I decided against it. For those who yearn for numbers, standard series on bank reserves, foreign trade, commodity prices, money supply, security prices, rate of interest, and the like are fairly readily available in the historical statistics.

It’s easy to have faith in yourself and have discipline when you’re a winner, when you’re number one. What you got to have is faith and discipline when you’re not a winner.” —Vince Lombardi, Pro Football Hall of Fame

So if you are afraid of being wrong or losing money, it means you will never learn enough to compensate for the negative effects these fears will have on your ability to be objective and your ability to act without hesitation.

They create our expectations. Keep in mind that an expectation is a belief projected into some future moment. Since we can’t expect something we don’t know about, we could also say that an expectation is what we know projected into some future moment.

A loser's true problem is not account size but overtrading and sloppy money management. He takes risks that are too big for his account size, however small or big. No matter how good his system may be, a streak of bad trades is sure to put him out of business.

We can’t have it all or do it all. If we could, there would be no reason to evaluate or eliminate options. Once we accept the reality of trade-offs we stop asking, “How can I make it all work?” and start asking the more honest question “Which problem do I want to solve?

A nation ignorant of the equal benefits of liberty and law, must be awed by the flashes of arbitrary power: the cruelty of a despot will assume the character of justice; his profusion, of liberality; his obstinacy, of firmness. If the most reasonable excuse be rejected, few acts of obedience will be found impossible; and guilt must tremble, where innocence cannot always be secure. The tranquillity of the people, and the discipline of the troops, were best maintained by perpetual action in the field; war was the trade of the Janizaries;

I define random trading as poorly-planned trades or trades that are not planned at all. It is an unorganized approach that takes into consideration an unlimited set of market variables, which do not allow you to find out what works on a consistent basis and what does not.

The mental baggage from childhood can prevent you from succeeding in the markets. You have to identify your weaknesses and work to change. Keep a trading diary—write down your reasons for entering and exiting every trade. Look for repetitive patterns of success and failure.

The winners have attained a mind-set—a unique set of attitudes—that allows them to remain disciplined, focused, and, above all, confident in spite of the adverse conditions. As a result, they are no longer susceptible to the common fears and trading errors that plague everyone else.

When you genuinely accept the risks, you will be at peace with any outcome. When you’re at peace with any outcome, you will experience a carefree, objective state of mind, where you make yourself available to perceive and act upon whatever the market is offering you (from its perspective) at any given “now moment.

All of us are born into some sort of social environment. A social environment (or society), whether its a family, city, state, or country, implies the existence of structure. Social structures consist of rules, restrictions, boundaries, and a set of beliefs that become a code of behavior that limits the ways in which individuals within that social structure can or cannot express themselves. Furthermore, most of the limitations of social structure were established before we are born. In other words, by the time any of us get here, most of the social structure governing our individual expression is in place and well entrenched.

1. I objectively identify my edges. 2. I predefine the risk of every trade. 3. I completely accept the risk or I am willing to let go of the trade. 4. I act on my edges without reservation or hesitation. 5. I pay myself as the market makes money available to me. 6. I continually monitor my susceptibility for making errors.

From a very early age Edison became used to doing things for himself, by necessity. His family was poor, and by the age of twelve he had to earn money to help his parents. He sold newspapers on trains, and traveling around his native Michigan for his job, he developed an ardent curiosity about everything he saw. He wanted to know how things worked—machines, gadgets, anything with moving parts. With no schools or teachers in his life, he turned to books, particularly anything he could find on science. He began to conduct his own experiments in the basement of his family home, and he taught himself how to take apart and fix any kind of watch. At the age of fifteen he apprenticed as a telegraph operator, then spent years traveling across the country plying his trade. He had no chance for a formal education, and nobody crossed his path who could serve as a teacher or mentor. And so in lieu of that, in every city he spent time in, he frequented the public library. One book that crossed his path played a decisive role in his life: Michael Faraday’s two-volume Experimental Researches in Electricity. This book became for Edison what The Improvement of the Mind had been for Faraday. It gave him a systematic approach to science and a program for how to educate himself in the field that now obsessed him—electricity. He could follow the experiments laid out by the great Master of the field and absorb as well his philosophical approach to science. For the rest of his life, Faraday would remain his role model. Through books, experiments, and practical experience at various jobs, Edison gave himself a rigorous education that lasted about ten years, up until the time he became an inventor. What made this successful was his relentless desire to learn through whatever crossed his path, as well as his self-discipline. He had developed the habit of overcoming his lack of an organized education by sheer determination and persistence. He worked harder than anyone else. Because he was a consummate outsider and his mind had not been indoctrinated in any school of thought, he brought a fresh perspective to every problem he tackled. He turned his lack of formal direction into an advantage. If you are forced onto this path, you must follow Edison’s example by developing extreme self-reliance. Under these circumstances, you become your own teacher and mentor. You push yourself to learn from every possible source. You read more books than those who have a formal education, developing this into a lifelong habit. As much as possible, you try to apply your knowledge in some form of experiment or practice. You find for yourself second-degree mentors in the form of public figures who can serve as role models. Reading and reflecting on their experiences, you can gain some guidance. You try to make their ideas come to life, internalizing their voice. As someone self-taught, you will maintain a pristine vision, completely distilled through your own experiences—giving you a distinctive power and path to mastery.

1. Anything can happen. 2. You don’t need to know what is going to happen next in order to make money. 3. There is a random distribution between wins and losses for any given set of variables that define an edge. 4. An edge is nothing more than an indication of a higher probability of one thing happening over another. 5. Every moment in the market is unique.

The best traders aren’t afraid. They aren’t afraid because they have developed attitudes that give them the greatest degree of mental flexibility to flow in and out of trades based on what the market is telling them about the possibilities from its perspective. At the same time, the best traders have developed attitudes that prevent them from getting reckless.

A non-Essentialist approaches every trade-off by asking, “How can I do both?” Essentialists ask the tougher but ultimately more liberating question, “Which problem do I want?” An Essentialist makes trade-offs deliberately. She acts for herself rather than waiting to be acted upon. As economist Thomas Sowell wrote: “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.

Those traders who have confidence in their own trades, who trust themselves to do what needs to be done without hesitation, are the ones who become successful. They no longer fear the erratic behavior of the market. They learn to focus on the information that helps them spot opportunities to make a profit, rather than focusing on the information that reinforces their fears.

If you are unable to trade without the slightest bit of emotional discomfort (specifically, fear), then you have not learned how to accept the risks inherent in trading. This is a big problem, because to whatever degree you haven’t accepted the risk, is the same degree to which you will avoid the risk. Trying to avoid something that is unavoidable will have disastrous effects on your ability to trade successfully.

The charge that Anarchism is destructive, rather than constructive, and that, therefore, Anarchism is opposed to organization, is one of the many falsehoods spread by our opponents. They confound our present social institutions with organization; hence they fail to understand how we can oppose the former, and yet favor the latter. The fact, however, is that the two are not identical. “The State is commonly regarded as the highest form of organization. But is it in reality a true organization? Is it not rather an arbitrary institution, cunningly imposed upon the masses? “Industry, too, is called an organization; yet nothing is farther from the truth. Industry is the ceaseless piracy of the rich against the poor. “We are asked to believe that the Army is an organization, but a close investigation will show that it is nothing else than a cruel instrument of blind force. “The Public School! The colleges and other institutions of learning, are they not models of organization, offering the people fine opportunities for instruction? Far from it. The school, more than any other institution, is a veritable barrack, where the human mind is drilled and manipulated into submission to various social and moral spooks, and thus fitted to continue our system of exploitation and oppression. “Organization, as WE understand it, however, is a different thing. It is based, primarily, on freedom. It is a natural and voluntary grouping of energies to secure results beneficial to humanity. “It is the harmony of organic growth which produces variety of color and form, the complete whole we admire in the flower. Analogously will the organized activity of free human beings, imbued with the spirit of solidarity, result in the perfection of social harmony, which we call Anarchism. In fact, Anarchism alone makes non-authoritarian organization of common interests possible, since it abolishes the existing antagonism between individuals and classes. “Under present conditions the antagonism of economic and social interests results in relentless war among the social units, and creates an insurmountable obstacle in the way of a co-operative commonwealth. “There is a mistaken notion that organization does not foster individual freedom; that, on the contrary, it means the decay of individuality. In reality, however, the true function of organization is to aid the development and growth of personality. “Just as the animal cells, by mutual co-operation, express their latent powers in formation of the complete organism, so does the individual, by co-operative effort with other individuals, attain his highest form of development. “An organization, in the true sense, cannot result from the combination of mere nonentities. It must be composed of self-conscious, intelligent individualities. Indeed, the total of the possibilities and activities of an organization is represented in the expression of individual energies. “It therefore logically follows that the greater the number of strong, self-conscious personalities in an organization, the less danger of stagnation, and the more intense its life element. “Anarchism asserts the possibility of an organization without discipline, fear, or punishment, and without the pressure of poverty: a new social organism which will make an end to the terrible struggle for the means of existence,—the savage struggle which undermines the finest qualities in man, and ever widens the social abyss. In short, Anarchism strives towards a social organization which will establish well-being for all. “The germ of such an organization can be found in that form of trades unionism which has done away with centralization, bureaucracy, and discipline, and which favors independent and direct action on the part of its members.

...Rusche and Kirchheimer relate the different systems of punishment with the systems of production within which they operate: thus, in a slave economy, punitive mechanisms serve to provide an additional labour force -- and to constitute a body of 'civil' slaves in addition to those provided by war or trading; with feudalism, at a time when money and production were still at an early stage of development, we find a sudden increase in corporal punishments -- the body being in most cases the only property accessible; the penitentiary (the Hopital General, the Spinhuis or the Rasphuis), forced labour and the prison factory appear with the development of the mercantile economy. But the industrial system requires a free market in labour and, in the nineteenth century, the role of forced labour in the mechanisms of punishment diminishes accordingly and 'corrective' detention takes its place.

When you operate from the assumption that more or better analysis will create consistency, you will be driven to gather as many market variables as possible into your arsenal of trading tools. But what happens then? You are still disappointed and betrayed by the markets, time and again, because of something you didn’t see or give enough consideration to. It will feel like you can’t trust the markets; but the reality is, you can’t trust yourself.

Creating an essential intent is hard. It takes courage, insight, and foresight to see which activities and efforts will add up to your single highest point of contribution. It takes asking tough questions, making real trade-offs, and exercising serious discipline to cut out the competing priorities that distract us from our true intention. Yet it is worth the effort because only with real clarity of purpose can people, teams, and organizations fully mobilize and achieve something truly excellent.

Courageous Leadership Simply Means I’ve Developed: 1. Convictions that are stronger than my fears. 2. Vision that is clearer than my doubts. 3. Spiritual sensitivity that is louder than popular opinion. 4. Self-esteem that is deeper than self-protection. 5. Appreciation for discipline that is greater than my desire for leisure. 6. Dissatisfaction that is more forceful than the status quo. 7. Poise that is more unshakeable than panic. 8. Risk taking that is stronger than safety seeking. 9. Right actions that are more robust than rationalization. 10. A desire to see potential reached more than to see people appeased. You don’t have to be great to become a person of courage. You just need to want to reach your potential and to be willing to trade what seems good in the moment for what’s best for your potential. That’s something you can do regardless of your level of natural talent. —Talent Is Never Enough MAKE A SMALL DECISION TODAY THAT WILL INCREASE YOUR CONFIDENCE AND LEADERSHIP COURAGE.

People normally describe this kind of internal mental shift as an “ah, ha” experience, or the moment when the light goes on. Everyone has had these kinds of experiences, and there are some common qualities associated with them. First, we usually feel different. The world even seems different, as if it had suddenly changed. Typically, we might say at the moment of the breakthrough something like, “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” or, “It was right in front of me the whole time, but I just didn’t see it

I wear glasses, and maybe you do, too. Mine probably cost about the same as yours. Would you trade lenses with me just because I asked you to? Of course not! That would be silly because yours fit you and mine fit me. Reading is the same thing. Are you reading what the boss is reading or are you reading what fits you? Are you reading a book because someone sent it to you? how about because it's on the bestseller list? You wouldn't wear someone else's glasses - don't let them pick your books. Understand what your purpose is for reading and carefully discipline your choices - Fred Smith

As creatures made in the image of a moral God, we are incapable of not making moral judgments, whatever our situation. A church that thinks it has gotten beyond last generation’s debates over music and wine will find that this generation’s debates over recycling and child discipline are just as divisive. A believer who has prided himself on being generous on disputable matters will suddenly find himself judging a fellow believer who doesn’t buy fair-trade coffee. Conscience issues will remain an important part of your personal life, your church life, and your ministry life for the rest of your life.

At one point, we had become concerned with how much screen time had crept into our family. Between television, computers, tablets, and smart phones it had become just too easy for the children to waste time on nonessential entertainment. But our attempts to get them to change these habits, as you can imagine, were met with friction. The children would complain whenever we turned the TV off or tried to limit their “screen time.” And we as the parents had to consciously police the situation, which took us away from doing things that were essential. So we introduced a token system.9 The children were given ten tokens at the beginning of the week. These could each be traded in for either thirty minutes of screen time or fifty cents at the end of the week, adding up to $5 or five hours of screen time a week. If a child read a book for thirty minutes, he or she would earn an additional token, which could also be traded in for screen time or for money. The results were incredible: overnight, screen time went down 90 percent, reading went up by the same amount, and the overall effort we had to put into policing the system went way, way down. In other words, nonessential activity dramatically decreased and essential activity dramatically increased.

From the moneyless economics of the classical school there evolved modern, orthodox macroeconomics: the science of monetary society taught in universities and deployed by central banks. From the practitioners’ economics of Bagehot, meanwhile, there evolved the academic discipline of finance—the tools of the trade taught in business schools, used by bankers and bond traders. One was an intellectual framework for understanding the economy without money, banks, and finance. The other was a framework for understanding money, banks, and finance, without the rest of the economy. The result of this intellectual apartheid was that when in 2008 a crisis in the financial sector caused the biggest macroeconomic crash in history, and when the economy failed to recover afterwards because the banking sector was broken, neither modern macroeconomics nor modern finance could make head nor tail of it.

Different persons ruled in me in turn, though no one of them for long; each fallen tyrant was quick to regain power. Thus have I played host successively to the meticulous officer, fanatic in discipline, but gaily sharing with his men the privations of war; to the melancholy dreamer intent on the gods, the lover ready to risk all for a moment’s rapture; the haughty young lieutenant retiring to his tent to study his maps by lamplight, making clear to his friends his disdain for the way the world goes; and finally the future statesman. But let us not forget, either, the base opportunist who in fear of displeasing succumbed to drunkenness at the emperor’s table; the young fellow pronouncing upon all questions with ridiculous assurance; the frivolous wit, ready to lose a friend for the sake of a bright remark; the soldier exercising with mechanical precision his vile gladiatorial trade. And we should include also that vacant figure, nameless and unplaced in history, though as much myself as all the others, the simple toy of circumstance, no more and no less than a body, lying on a camp bed, distracted by an aroma, aroused by a breath of wind, vaguely attentive to some eternal hum of a bee.

The violence exercised in the service of human commodification relied on a scientific empiricism always seeking to find the limits of human capacity for suffering, that point where material and social poverty threatened to consume entirely the lives it was meant to garner for sale in the Americas. In this regard, the economic enterprise of human trafficking marked a watershed in what would become an enduring project in the modern Western world: probing the limits up to which it is possible to discipline the body without extinguishing the life within. The aim in the case being economic efficiency rather than punishment, this was a regime whose intent was not to torture but rather to manage the depletion of life that resulted from the conditions of saltwater slavery. But for the Africans who were starved, sorted, and warped to make them into saltwater slaves, torture was the result. It takes no great insight to point to the role of violence in the Atlantic slave trade. But to understand what happened to Africans in this system of human trafficking requires us to ask precisely what kind of violence it requires to achieve its end, the transformation of African captives into Atlantic commodities.

Article VI No State, without the consent of the United States in Congress assembled, shall send any embassy to, or receive any embassy from, or enter into any conference, agreement, alliance or treaty with any King, Prince or State; nor shall any person holding any office of profit or trust under the United States, or any of them, accept any present, emolument, office or title of any kind whatever from any King, Prince or foreign State; nor shall the United States in Congress assembled, or any of them, grant any title of nobility. No two or more States shall enter into any treaty, confederation or alliance whatever between them, without the consent of the United States in Congress assembled, specifying accurately the purposes for which the same is to be entered into, and how long it shall continue. No State shall lay any imposts or duties, which may interfere with any stipulations in treaties, entered into by the United States in Congress assembled, with any King, Prince or State, in pursuance of any treaties already proposed by Congress, to the courts of France and Spain. No vessel of war shall be kept up in time of peace by any State, except such number only, as shall be deemed necessary by the United States in Congress assembled, for the defense of such State, or its trade; nor shall any body of forces be kept up by any State in time of peace, except such number only, as in the judgement of the United States in Congress assembled, shall be deemed requisite to garrison the forts necessary for the defense of such State; but every State shall always keep up a well-regulated and disciplined militia, sufficiently armed and accoutered, and shall provide and constantly have ready for use, in public stores, a due number of filed pieces and tents, and a proper quantity of arms, ammunition and camp equipage. No State shall engage in any war without the consent of the United States in Congress assembled, unless such State be actually invaded by enemies, or shall have received certain advice of a resolution being formed by some nation of Indians to invade such State, and the danger is so imminent as not to admit of a delay till the United States in Congress assembled can be consulted; nor shall any State grant commissions to any ships or vessels of war, nor letters of marque or reprisal, except it be after a declaration of war by the United States in Congress assembled, and then only against the Kingdom or State and the subjects thereof, against which war has been so declared, and under such regulations as shall be established by the United States in Congress assembled, unless such State be infested by pirates, in which case vessels of war may be fitted out for that occasion, and kept so long as the danger shall continue, or until the United States in Congress assembled shall determine otherwise.

we were unprepared for how some people in our lives had the potential to behave. If their behavior caused us to flip into a state of emotional pain, then we quite naturally would have felt betrayed.

For if one is to be a warrior, he has to pay attention to his trade and art. Discipline is the first rule of success.

You will read over and over again in this book how important it is to do your homework. To prepare. To practice. To be disciplined. To be smart. To make smart trading moves. You will not win every round against algorithms and HFT, but you can win some of the rounds, and you can profit. You must be able to identify the different algorithmic programs so that you can trade against them. This takes some experience, good mentoring, and practice.

If you want to succeed with trading, then you MUST invest both time and money to acquire the knowledge that you need, the discipline to follow your trading strategy, and the patience to wait for the "perfect trade.

objective perspective

Why wouldn’t someone want to win? It’s really not a question of what someone wants, because I believe that all traders want to win. Yet, there are often conflicts about winning. Sometimes these conflicts are so powerful that we find our behavior is in direct conflict with what we want. These conflicts could stem from religious upbringing, work ethic or certain types of childhood trauma.

Extended kinship groups - sometimes located on one plantation, more commonly extended over several - became the central units of slave life, ordering society, articulating values, and delineating identity by defining the boundaries of trust. They also became the nexus for incorporating the never-ending stream of arrivals from the seaboard states into the new society, cushioning the horror of the Second Middle Passage, and socializing the deportees to the realities of life on the plantation frontier. Playing the role of midwives, the earlier arrivals transformed strangers into brothers and sisters, melding the polyglot immigrants into one. In defining obligations and responsibilities, the family became the centerpole of slave life. The arrival of the first child provided transplanted slaves with the opportunity to link the world they had lost to the world that had been forced upon them. In naming their children for some loved one left behind, pioneer slaves restored the generational linkages for themselves and connected their children with grandparents they would never know. Some pioneer slaves reached back beyond their parents' generation, suggesting how slavery's long history on mainland North America could be collapsed by a single act. Along the same mental pathways that joined the charter and migration generations flowed other knowledge. Rituals carried from Africa might be as simple as the way a mother held a child to her breast or as complex as a cure for warts. Songs for celebrating marriage, ceremonies for breaking bread, and last rites for an honored elder survived in the minds of those forced from their seaboard homes, along with the unfulfilled promise of the Age of Revolution and evangelical awakenings. Still, the new order never quite duplicated the old. Even as transplanted slaves strained their memories to reconstruct what they had once known, slavery itself was being recast. The lush thicket of kin that deportees like Hawkins Wilson remembered had been obliterated by the Second Middle Passage. Although pioneer slaves worked assiduously to knit together a new family fabric, elevating elderly slaves into parents and deputizing friends as kin, of necessity they had to look beyond blood and marriage. Kin emerged as well from a new religious sensibility, as young men and women whose families had been ravaged by the Second Middle Passage embraced one another as brothers and sisters in Christ. A cadre of black evangelicals, many of who had been converted in the revivals of the late eighteenth century, became chief agents of the expansion of African-American Christianity. James Williams, a black driver who had been transferred from Virginia to the Alabama blackbelt, was just one of many believers who was 'torn away from the care and discipline of their respective churches.' Swept westward by the tide of the domestic slave trade, they 'retained their love for the exercises of religion.

where a = accumulated future value, p = principal or present value, r = rate of return in percentage terms, and n = number of compounding periods. All too often, management teams focus on the r variable in this equation. They seek instant gratification, with high profit margins and high growth in reported earnings per share (EPS) in the near term, as opposed to initiatives that would lead to a much more valuable business many years down the line. This causes many management teams to pass on investments that would create long-term value but would cause “accounting numbers” to look bad in the short term. Pressure from analysts can inadvertently incentivize companies to make as much money as possible off their present customers to report good quarterly numbers, instead of offering a fair price that creates enduring goodwill and a long-term win–win relationship for all stakeholders. The businesses that buy commodities and sell brands and have strong pricing power (typically depicted by high gross margins) should always remember that possessing pricing power is like having access to a large amount of credit. You may have it in abundance, but you must use it sparingly. Having pricing power doesn’t mean you exercise it right away. Consumer surplus is a great strategy, especially for subscription-based business models in which management should primarily focus on habit formation and making renewals a no-brainer. Most businesses fail to appreciate this delicate trade-off between high short-term profitability and the longevity accorded to the business through disciplined pricing and offering great customer value. The few businesses that do understand this trade-off always display “pain today, gain tomorrow” thinking in their daily decisions.

The freedom is great. All of us seem to naturally want it, strive for it, even crave it. But that doesn’t mean that we have the appropriate psychological resources to operate effectively in an environment that has few, if any, boundaries and where the potential to do enormous damage to ourselves exists. Almost everyone needs to make some mental adjustments, regardless of their educational background, intelligence or how successful they’ve been in other endeavors.

Airlines pay high salaries to pilots despite having autopilots. They do it because humans can handle unforeseen events. When a roof blows off an airliner over the Pacific or when a passenger jet loses both engines to a flock of geese over Manhattan, only a human can handle such crises. These emergencies have been reported in the press, and in each of them, experienced pilots managed to land their airliners by improvising solutions. No autopilot can do that. Betting your money on an automatic system is like betting your life on an autopilot. The first unexpected event will make your account crash and burn.

Winter is coming! Follow these rules for a disciplined mind and positive changes.

But when we try to do it all and have it all, we find ourselves making trade-offs at the margins that we would never take on as our intentional strategy. When we don’t purposefully and deliberately choose where to focus our energies and time, other people—our bosses, our colleagues, our clients, and even our families—will choose for us, and before long we’ll have lost sight of everything that is meaningful and important. We can either make our choices deliberately or allow other people’s agendas to control our lives.

It’s at the height of our powers that we need the clearest mind. We can’t be blinded by substances or a sense of superiority. “People of humble station have more leeway when it comes to using force, bringing suits, rushing into quarrels, and indulging their anger,” Seneca wrote, for “blows traded by equals do little harm. But for a king, even raising his voice to use intemperate language is at odds with his majesty.

A call to detach ourselves from the myth that the only and best way to raise a child depends on the presence of a man we call a father. It’s also a call to reexamine what we expect from fathers, present or not. What’s imagined is Cliff Huxtable trading wit and canned wisdom with his children before traipsing off to a job that enables to provide financially and then coming home to hand out a healthy dose of necessary discipline to keep the children well-behaved. What’s real is that having a father in the home increases the likelihood for abuse for both the spouse and children. What’s real are fathers who are broken and showing up to fill a role that they themselves are struggling to understand. We have spent so much time valorizing the mere existence of fathers we haven’t discussed what type of fathers they will be. We haven’t shown any concern for whether or not these fathers show up as full, healthy human beings.

In my work I’ve noticed that senior executives of companies are among the worst at accepting the reality of trade-offs. I recently spent some time with the CEO of a company in Silicon Valley valued at $40 billion. He shared with me the value statement of his organization, which he had just crafted, and which he planned to announce to the whole company. But when he shared it I cringed: “We value passion, innovation, execution, and leadership.” One of several problems with the list is, Who doesn’t value these things? Another problem is that this tells employees nothing about what the company values most. It says nothing about what choices employees should be making when these values are at odds. This is similarly true when companies claim that their mission is to serve all stakeholders—clients, employees, shareholders—equally. To say they value equally everyone they interact with leaves management with no clear guidance on what to do when faced with trade-offs between the people they serve.

Jim Collins, the author of the business classic Good to Great, was once told by Peter Drucker that he could either build a great company or build great ideas but not both. Jim chose ideas. As a result of this trade-off there are still only three full-time employees in his company, yet his ideas have reached tens of millions of people through his writing

Upon encountering Islam by whatever means, Drew was soundly impressed with the appeal of the religion, initially. This ancient Middle Eastern religion attracted the North Carolinian with not only its strict moral discipline but also the modest way its worshippers dressed and the proud and sober manner in which they carried themselves. After reportedly coming under the influence of Muslim teachers, Drew came to view Islam as “the only instrument for Negro unity and advancement.” 7 Lacking knowledge of the Arabic language as well as grounding in Muslim orthodoxy, he examined its dogma as best he could by probing the international faith with a keen eye out for remedies that would help Negroes relieve the sociopolitical pain and suffering they endured early in the twentieth century as an oppressed people in the United States. The young black supplicant found no such balm in orthodox Islam. Also, he reasoned that Arabic dogma would be a tough sell to a generation of Negroes just out of slavery and barely literate in English. Most troubling of all, the Arab Muslims in the Middle East had a long and barbaric history of enslaving sub-Saharan Africans—indeed, they dominated this ruthless human trade in Morocco and Egypt. Additionally, the Moors were known to widely practice color-caste discrimination among themselves.

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.” —Plato

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” —Albert Einstein

The spiritual disciplines are art forms. Your first prayer will probably look like a kindergartener’s painting. Of course, God still puts it on His refrigerator! But if you keep practicing prayer, your faith will become fluent. Living a Spirit-led life is a steep learning curve. It takes time—and by time, I mean decades, not days. You have to grow in the spiritual disciplines little by little. That’s how you go from strength to strength. You keep benchmarking

Which Problem Do I Want? STRATEGY IS ABOUT MAKING CHOICES, TRADE-OFFS. IT’S ABOUT DELIBERATELY CHOOSING TO BE DIFFERENT. —Michael Porter

The moral of the story: ignoring the reality of trade-offs is a terrible strategy for organizations.

Trade-offs are real, in both our personal and our professional lives, and until we accept that reality we’ll be doomed to be just like Continental—stuck in a “straddled strategy” that forces us to make sacrifices on the margins by default that we might not have made by design.

To say they value equally everyone they interact with leaves management with no clear guidance on what to do when faced with trade-offs between the people they serve.

Nonessentialist approaches every trade-off by asking, “How can I do both?” Essentialists ask the tougher but ultimately more liberating question, “Which problem do I want?

1. Individual choice: We can choose how to spend our energy and time. Without choice, there is no point in talking about trade-offs. 2. The prevalence of noise: Almost everything is noise, and a very few things are exceptionally valuable. This is the justification for taking time to figure out what is most important. Because some things are so much more important, the effort in finding those things is worth it. 3. The reality of trade-offs: We can’t have it all or do it all. If we could, there would be no reason to evaluate or eliminate options. Once we accept the reality of trade-offs we stop asking, “How can I make it all work?” and start asking the more honest question “Which problem do I want to solve?

This is not a process you undertake once a year, once a month, or even once a week, like organizing your closet. It is a discipline you apply each and every time you are faced with a decision about whether to say yes or whether to politely decline. It’s a method for making the tough trade-off between lots of good things and a few really great things. It’s about learning how to do less but better so you can achieve the highest possible return on every precious moment of your life.

When we were newlyweds, Anna and I met someone who had, as far as we could tell, an amazing marriage and family. We wanted to learn from him, so we asked him, What’s your secret? One of the things he told us was that he and his wife had decided not to be a part of any clubs. He didn’t join the local lodge. She didn’t join the book clubs. It wasn’t that they had no interest in those things. It was simply that they made the trade-off to spend that time with their children. Over the years their children had become their best friends—well worth the sacrifice of any friendships they might have made on the golf course or over tattered copies of Anna Karenina. Essentialists see trade-offs as an inherent part of life, not as an inherently negative part of life. Instead of asking, “What do I have to give up?” they ask, “What do I want to go big on?” The cumulative impact of this small change in thinking can be profound.

attitudes about being wrong, losing money, missing out, and leaving money on the table.

As a day trader, you shouldn’t care about companies and their earnings. Day traders are not concerned about what companies do or what they make. Your attention should only be on price action, technical indicators and chart patterns. I know more stock symbols than the names of actual companies.

I once worked with an executive team that needed help with their prioritization. They were struggling to identify the top five projects they wanted their IT department to complete over the next fiscal year, and one of the managers was having a particularly hard time with it. She insisted on naming eighteen “top priority” projects. I insisted that she choose five. She took her list back to her team, and two weeks later they returned with a list she had managed to shorten—by one single project! (I always wondered what it was about that one lone project that didn’t make the cut.) By refusing to make trade-offs, she ended up spreading five projects’ worth of time and effort across seventeen projects. Unsurprisingly, she did not get the results she wanted. Her logic had been: We can do it all. Obviously not. It is easy to see why it’s so tempting to deny the reality of trade-offs. After all, by definition, a trade-off involves two things we want. Do you want more pay or more vacation time? Do you want to finish this next e-mail or be on time to your meeting? Do you want it done faster or better?

Any judge’s remarks on any person offended by the defamation of a third party are themselves immoral and even defamatory and aspersion; such words and conduct also demonstrate to support the accused party. Everybody knows that the law and justice are blind, but if a judge proves through their remarks of judicial vanity that the law and justice are not blind in their court, consequently, such judges become unqualified to pursue such a matter, they should quit. Be aware that the law is mostly for the public, not the republican authorities; similarly, the rules of the United Nations are only for its methodical members, not the veto holders. Accordingly, the teeth of an elephant define that in a suitable and relevant context since children feel happy and enjoy it in a circus without realizing the reality, even if their parents pay for it. Indeed, it is an authentic fact. Abolishing or violating any law, rule, or constitution is an act of disloyalty to the state and its people; it does not fall under good faith; it is the way of the traitor. Giving legal status to such a traitor for any reason is itself a crime. Apply the law, discipline, attitude, or morality to yourself before you apply it to others. The breaking and breaching of law, rule, or principle for transparent justice to save human rights and the lives of people in danger is not a violation of such juristic and moral terms. The law, the constitution, or the manifesto of political parties is similar to two sets of teeth, like an elephant, one for eating and one for floating. Forget human rights, transparent justice, neutrality, fairness, sincerity, and honesty since they only exist in books, not in practice; it is a bitter reality that the world is a trade chamber, and we live and breathe in it with our interests. Such justice, which one cannot achieve without substantial money, represents not veritable justice but judicial business for rich ones through lawyers and judges. However, real justice only stays in dictionaries and law books for reading since one can see itself in the mirror but cannot draw it out of it.

A person excels when he disciplines the senses with the mind and engages the organs of action in work without getting attached to sensations. -Bhagavad Gita

Working memory is where you think. It’s where the voice in your head lives, and it’s like a whiteboard in your mind where you consciously put pieces together and work through problems. Under normal circumstances you have access to between five and nine pieces of information at one time in your working memory. This part of the brain is already limited,

but anxiety and fear shrink that number even further. You struggle to answer the question driving your fear because you lack the space to consider all the relevant data. Imagine trying to complete a 1000-piece puzzle by only looking at three pieces at a time—your mind goes into overdrive in a desperate attempt to find the pieces needed to solve the problem.

What I’ve discovered is that trading is chock full of paradoxes and contradictions in thinking that make it extremely difficult to learn how to be successful.

This very circumstance sets up a conflict, for it is a constant law of human nature that the more a man has to indulge in, the less disposed he is to endure the discipline of toil—that is to say, the less willing he is to produce that which is to be consumed. Labor ceases to be functional in life; it becomes something that is grudgingly traded for that competence, or that superfluity, which everyone has a “right” to.

The best traders stay in the flow because they don’t try to get anything from the market; they simply make themselves available so they can take advantage of whatever the market is offering at any given moment.

Les pertes sont inévitables, sauf le cas de Madoff. Vous avez besoin d'accepter ce fait vous ne pouvez pas éviter les perd. Essayer d'éviter les pertes ne fera que provoquer des pertes plus importantes. Votre travail consiste à «essayer» les garder petits. Lorsque vous détailler exactement ce que vous êtes prêt à risquer un Trading d'accepter le fait que le Trading ne pas avoir à travailler. Acceptez le fait que vous pouvez perdre de l'argent. Cet argent vous êtes prêt à perdre doit être une petite quantité qui n'affecte pas votre état émotionnel ou votre compte de trading. Par exemple, si vous disposez d'un compte de trading 100.000 $ et que vous êtes prêt à risquer 1% sur un Trade vous vous tenez la possibilité de perdre 1000 $. Si vous ne pouvez pas tolérer que vous pouvez réduire votre risque sur le Trading à un pourcentage inférieur ou tout simplement peut-être la Trade n'est pas pour vous. Vous avez besoin d'accepter l'incertitude la plus complète lorsque nous faisons des échanges. La seule certitude est l'incertitude. Une fois que votre serviteur internaliser ce fait de commencer la construction de la patience et de la discipline. La discipline est d'avoir des règles de Trade et ayant la capacité de les suivre parce que vous avez accepté les risques inhérents lors de la Trade ainsi que la

It’s a method for making the tough trade-off between lots of good things and a few really great things.

STRATEGY IS ABOUT MAKING CHOICES, TRADE-OFFS. IT’S ABOUT DELIBERATELY CHOOSING TO BE DIFFERENT. —Michael Porter

According to Porter, “A strategic position is not sustainable unless there are trade-offs with other positions.”3

ignoring the reality of trade-offs is a terrible strategy for organizations. It turns out to be a terrible strategy for people as well.

A Nonessentialist approaches every trade-off by asking, “How can I do both?” Essentialists ask the tougher but ultimately more liberating question, “Which problem do I want?” An Essentialist makes trade-offs deliberately.

As economist Thomas Sowell wrote: “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.

A Chinese Zen master[FN#230] tells us that the method of instruction adopted by Zen may aptly be compared with that of an old burglar who taught his son the art of burglary. The burglar one evening said to his little son, whom he desired to instruct in the secret of his trade: "Would you not, my dear boy, be a great burglar like myself?" "Yes, father," replied the promising young man." "Come with me, then. I will teach you the art." So saying, the man went out, followed by his son. Finding a rich mansion in a certain village, the veteran burglar made a hole in the wall that surrounded it. Through that hole they crept into the yard, and opening a window with complete ease broke into the house, where they found a huge box firmly locked up as if its contents were very valuable articles. The old man clapped his hands at the lock, which, strange to tell, unfastened itself. Then he removed the cover and told his son to get into it and pick up treasures as fast as he could. No sooner had the boy entered the box than the father replaced the cover and locked it up. He then exclaimed at the top of his voice: "Thief! thief! thief! thief!" Thus, having aroused the inmates, he went out without taking anything. All the house was in utter confusion for a while; but finding nothing stolen, they went to bed again. The boy sat holding his breath a short while; but making up his mind to get out of his narrow prison, began to scratch the bottom of the box with his finger-nails. The servant of the house, listening to the noise, supposed it to be a mouse gnawing at the inside of the box; so she came out, lamp in hand, and unlocked it. On removing the cover, she was greatly surprised to find the boy instead of a little mouse, and gave alarm. In the meantime the boy got out of the box and went down into the yard, hotly pursued by the people. He ran as fast as possible toward the well, picked up a large stone, threw it down into it, and hid himself among the bushes. The pursuers, thinking the thief fell into the well, assembled around it, and were looking into it, while the boy crept out unnoticed through the hole and went home in safety. Thus the burglar taught his son how to rid himself of overwhelming difficulties by his own efforts; so also Zen teachers teach their pupils how to overcome difficulties that beset them on all sides and work out salvation by themselves. [FN#230]

There is, however, a trade-off in pursuing the higher levels. We will have to give up the immediate gratification, intensity, and surface apparentness of the lower levels of happiness. As will be explained in the next chapter, this requires commitment, discipline, and good habits, because immediate gratification, intensity, and surface apparentness make Levels One and Two hard to resist. They are like a “default drive”, because they are enticing, intense in their fulfillment, and immediately gratifying. Moreover, our culture promotes them as if they are the only things worth striving for and can be completely satisfying and meaningful.

To succeed, you will need motivation, knowledge, and discipline.

Winners embrace hard work. They love the discipline of it, the trade-off they're making to win. Losers, on the other hand, see it as punishment. And that's the difference.

Hans W. Frei argues that the Enlightenment period was liable for a significant portion of the eclipse of the biblical narratives. In place of the biblical narrative as the hermeneutical source and target came “the single meaning of a grammatically and logically sound propositional statement.”125 Grondin insightfully writes, regarding this emphasis on proposition, “For hermeneutics, by contrast, the proposition is something secondary and derivative.”126 The road from university to diversity traded story for proposition, mystery for the exactness of rules, and a deductive slant for one that was largely inductive. Thus, Western biblical hermeneutics followed the Enlightenment-influenced trail that saw hermeneutics as the study of right principles or as the laying out of rules governing the discipline of interpretation.

I kiss Orion deeply, one last time. “Are you sure you don’t want to come in with me?” I ask.               “I don’t think it’s going to help your case,” the raptor replies. “I mean, some people just don’t understand that love is real. You’ve gotta put yourself in there position. They’re so used to everything working a certain way, women kissing men, men kissing men… not men kissing dinosaurs.”               I want to protest but I know that he’s right. Even the most liberal of juries is going to have a hard time with this muscular dinosaur sitting there in the courtroom while I argue my case. It’s better if we part ways here.               “I’ll see you soon.” I tell him, my voice quaking. We both know that’s not going to happen, but we’re trying our best to pretend.               “I love you,” Orion says to me one last time.               “I love you, too” I assure him.               We kiss again and then I finally muster up the discipline to pull away and push out through the car’s door. I stand up on the sidewalk before the courthouse as flash bulbs burst with blinding luminescence. I shield my eyes, stunned for a moment as I struggle to collect my bearings.               “Mr. Tanner!” someone interjects, shoving a microphone in my face. “Is it true you hate unicorns?”               “What?” I stammer.               “We understand that your mission was funded off the profits of illegally traded unicorn tears, do you have anything to say to that?”               “I mean…” I’m still trying to collect my bearings, struggling to sort through her words. “No, wait, yeah I do. That’s really bad, I didn’t know anything about it.”               The reporter nods and repeats my words back to me. “Really bad… so you’re saying it’s not awful? Is that what you’re saying?”               “No, I just…” I start.               “Because it sounds like you’re not really coming out against the illegal trade of unicorn tears,” the reporter continues.               “I literally heard about it five seconds ago,” I counter. “That sounds terrible, I don’t really know anything about it but it sounds really bad and I don’t support that.”               The reporter nods. “Okay it’s really hard to understand you when you speak in code like this. Can you just answer the question? Do you or don’t you support bad guys doing bad things? Because you haven’t really come out against them.”               “I don’t support bad guys,” I try to say as clearly as I possibly can.               The reporter just stares at me blankly. “So you’re not going to come out against them?”               Suddenly, someone from the mob pushes me from behind and I stumble forward. The entire gang of hungry journalists and newscasters has reached a tipping point and I realize now that if I don’t continue onward there is going to be a problem.               I

Many traders think a good trading day is a positive day. Wrong. A good trading day is a day that you were disciplined, traded sound strategies and did not violate any trading rules. The normal uncertainty of the stock market will result in some of your days being negative, but that does not mean that a negative day was a bad trading day.

Today was the end of freedom. High school had fallen behind; college loomed ahead. Tomorrow he traded freedom and Arizona for Colorado and discipline.

trading. If you have strong discipline but negative edge system, you will lose over period of time. Similarly, if you have positive edge system and discipline but overleverage, then one black swan event will shut down your trading business. “Men

A good trading day is a day that you were disciplined, traded sound strategies and did not violate any trading rules.

With the coming of spring they would start back to the highlands, their flocks heavy with fat and wool; the caravans loaded with food and provisions purchased out of the proceeds from work and trading; men, women, and children displaying bits of finery they had picked up in the plains. This way of life had endured for centuries, but it would not last forever. It constituted defiance to certain concepts, which the world was beginning to associate with civilization itself. Concepts such as statehood, citizenship, undivided loyalty to one state, settled life as opposed to nomadic life, and the writ of the state as opposed to tribal discipline. The pressures were inexorable. One set of values, one way of life, had to die. In this clash, the state, as always, proved stronger than the individual. The new way of life triumphed over the old. The clash came about first in Soviet Russia. After a few years, the nomad died in both China and Iran.

The moral of the story: ignoring the reality of trade-offs is a terrible strategy for organisations. It turns out to be a terrible strategy for people as well.

Essentialists see trade-offs as an inherent part of life, not as an inherently negative part of life. Instead of asking, “What do I have to give up?” they ask, “What do I want to go big on?” The cumulative impact of this small change in thinking can be profound.

The way of the Essentialist rejects the idea that we can fit it all in. Instead it requires us to grapple with real trade-offs and make tough decisions. In many cases we can learn to make one-time decisions that make a thousand future decisions so we don’t exhaust ourselves asking the same questions again and again.

I don’t recommend day trading for new traders. The pickings are small and the losses could be large. Your tendency to let the losses run and take profits quickly will prevail. You will not put stop losses, or if you see a loss you won’t close the position on the same day, which is the essence of day trading. These kinds of normal trading tendencies among new traders are what lead them into a loser’s game. So wait for a year or two till you have used longer forms of trading and are disciplined with stop losses, closing out losses, and letting profits run before attempting day trades.

Douglas warns, “If the market's behavior seems mysterious to you, it's because your own behavior is mysterious and unmanageable. You can't really determine what the market is likely to do next when you don't even know what you'll do next.” Ultimately, “the one thing you can control is yourself. As a trader, you have the power either to give yourself money or to give your money to other traders.” He adds, “The traders who can make money consistently…approach trading from the perspective of a mental discipline.

So we introduced a token system.9 The children were given ten tokens at the beginning of the week. These could each be traded in for either thirty minutes of screen time or fifty cents at the end of the week, adding up to $5 or five hours of screen time a week. If a child read a book for thirty minutes, he or she would earn an additional token, which could also be traded in for screen time or for money. The results were incredible: overnight,

SEPTEMBER 11 Fueling Relief When we finally got the clearance to drive through the checkpoints, two weeks after the World Trade Center attacks, the street was lined with New Yorkers—New Yorkers!—waving banners with simple messages. “We love you. You’re our heroes. God bless you. Thank you.” The workers were running on that support as their vehicles ran on fuel. They had so little good news in a day. They faced a mountainously depressing task of removing tons and tons of twisted steel, compacted dirt, smashed equipment, broken glass. But every time they drove past the barricades, they faced a line of fans cheering them on, like the tunnel of cheerleaders that football players run through, reminding them that an entire nation appreciated their service. In a Salvation Army van with lights flashing, we attracted some of the loudest cheers of all. Moises Serrano, the Salvation Army officer leading us, was Incident Director for the city. He had been on the job barely a month when the planes hit. He worked thirty-six straight hours and slept four, forty hours and slept six, forty more hours and slept six. Then he took a day off. His assistant had an emotional breakdown early on, in the same van I was riding in, and may never recover. Many of the Salvationists I met hailed from Florida, the hurricane crews who keep fully stocked canteens and trucks full of basic supplies. When the Manhattan buildings fell, they mobilized all those trucks and drove them to New York. The crew director told me, “To tell you the truth, I came up here expecting to deal with Yankees, if you know what I mean. Instead, it’s all smiles and thank yous.” I came to appreciate the cheerful toughness of the Salvation Army. These soldiers worked in the morgue and served on the front lines. Over the years, though, they had developed an inner strength based on discipline, on community, and above all on a clear vision of whom they were serving. The Salvation Army may have a hierarchy of command, but every soldier knows he or she is performing for an audience of One. As one told me, Salvationists serve in order to earn the ultimate accolade from God himself: “Well done, thy good and faithful servant.” Finding God in Unexpected Places

MAKE YOUR PEACE WITH THE FACT THAT SAYING “NO” OFTEN REQUIRES TRADING POPULARITY FOR RESPECT

We can try to avoid the reality of trade-offs, but we can’t escape them.

Thomas Sowell wrote: “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.

They do not sit in the judge’s seat, nor do they understand the sentence of judgment;  they cannot expound discipline or judgment, and they are not found using proverbs. 34But they keep stable the fabric of the world, and their prayer is in the practice of their trade.

The artist knows total dependence on the unseen reality. The paradox is that the creative process is incomplete unless the artist is, in the best and most proper sense of the word, a technician, one who knows the tools of his trade, has studied his techniques, is disciplined. One writer said, “If I leave my work for a day, it leaves me for three.” I think it was Artur Rubinstein who admitted, “If I don’t practice the piano for one day I know it. If I don’t practice it for two days my family knows it. If I don’t practice it for three days, my public knows it.

An intelligent businessman takes only risks that will not put him out of business, even if he makes several mistakes in a row.

At that point, even the most inveterate pirates will have to trade in their Jolly Roger for the flag of a legitimate, disciplined navy. If they don’t, their organizations will devolve into chaos.

Ultimately, for this process to work, you must choose consistency over every other reason or justification you have for trading. If all of these ingredients are sufficiently present, then regardless of the internal obstacles you find yourself up against, what you desire will eventually prevail.

The real poetry, the "true romance" which Mr. Kipling has taught, is the romance of the division of labour and the discipline of all the trades. He sings the arts of peace much more accurately than the arts of war.

The Phlegmatic-Sanguine Person (PHLEG-SAN) These people are mostly seen as introverts. They are most peaceful people who go forgo their rights in order to live peacefully with others. Their temperament combination makes them very ideal people to get along with. Strengths of the PHLEG-SAN person They are gentle people who are honored in any group they find themselves. They are also very thoughtful and diplomatic. They are dependable and will rarely let the secret confided to them by friends. They have self-control. They are rarely seen exchanging words with people. They prefer forfeiting their rights and living peacefully with people to demanding these, which may lead to married relations. They enjoy the quiet life. They are the types who tell jokes without laughing. while others are laughing, they remain quiet, as if the humor came from somewhere else. It seems all fields of work are open to them. For example, they are good accountants, registrars, ministers, mechanics, teachers, and counsellors. This group of people do not enjoy trading activities but can do them when motivated Weaknesses of the PHLEG-SAN person These types of people are almost similar to their counterpart- the SAN-PHLEG. They lack motivation. They need to be motivated else they will leave their responsibilities undone. They allow themselves to be instructed and directed by people around them. Thus here, they fall victim to the sin of negligence. They procrastinate and often come out late. As senior officers their trays are always full of pending letters. They build shells around themselves and avoid many people and activities that could be useful to them in future. They let golden opportunities to pass by peacefully. Unless they develop personal discipline, they may never develop their natural potential. They are fearful; they need little motivation to put them to action. They lead a too relaxed life; they can even fall asleep while waiting for friends at the reception. A person of this temperament can always move peacefully with the strong willed CHOL-MEL person.

People deceive and play games with themselves. Lying to others is bad, but lying to yourself is hopeless.

The reality of trade-offs: We can’t have it all or do it all. If we could, there would be no reason to evaluate or eliminate options. Once we accept the reality of trade-offs we stop asking, “How can I make it all work?” and start asking the more honest question “Which problem do I want to solve?

What motivated it? How was the trade managed? Was it successful? Why? Did you lose? Why? Write down your assessment and refer to your comments before making your next trade.

Research has shown that the winners in any endeavor think, feel, and act differently than those who lose. If you want to know if you have the self-discipline of a winner, try right now, starting today, to stop a habit that has challenged you in the past. If you have always wanted to be in better physical shape, try adding exercises such as running into your routine, and also take control of your salt and sugar intake. If you drink too much alcohol or coffee, try to see if for one month you can stay away from them. These are excellent tests to see if you are emotionally and intellectually strong enough or not to discipline yourself in the face of a losing trade. I am not saying that if you drink coffee or alcohol, or that if you are not a regular runner, you cannot become a successful trader, but if you make a try at these types of improvements and fail, then you should know that exercising self-control in trading will not be any easier to accomplish. Change is hard, but if you wish to be a successful trader, you need to work on changing and developing your personality at every level. Working hard at it is the only way to sustain the changes you need to make. The measure of intelligence is not in IQ tests or how to make money, but it is in the ability to change. As Oprah Winfrey, the American talk show host and philanthropist once said, the greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change their future by merely changing their attitude.

now protecting ourselves from information.

A graceful “no” grows out of a clear but unstated calculation of the trade-off.

up

Trading is not the path to free money; profits must be earned through homework, discipline, courage, patience, and perseverance in the markets.” – Rich Trader

A disciplined trader will not risk more than about 2% of their total account on any one trade.

My wife Anna and I have tried to apply these ideas to our system of parenting. At one point, we had become concerned with how much screen time had crept into our family. Between television, computers, tablets, and smart phones it had become just too easy for the children to waste time on nonessential entertainment. But our attempts to get them to change these habits, as you can imagine, were met with friction. The children would complain whenever we turned the TV off or tried to limit their “screen time.” And we as the parents had to consciously police the situation, which took us away from doing things that were essential. So we introduced a token system.9 The children were given ten tokens at the beginning of the week. These could each be traded in for either thirty minutes of screen time or fifty cents at the end of the week, adding up to $5 or five hours of screen time a week. If a child read a book for thirty minutes, he or she would earn an additional token, which could also be traded in for screen time or for money. The results were incredible: overnight, screen time went down 90 percent, reading went up by the same amount, and the overall effort we had to put into policing the system went way, way down. In other words, nonessential activity dramatically decreased and essential activity dramatically increased. Once a small amount of initial effort was invested to set up the system, it worked without friction. We can all create systems like this both at home and at work. The key is to start small, encourage progress, and celebrate small wins. Here are a few techniques.

Page 1-2 One of the most serious concerns of the Thai government for the past forty years or so has been the presence within the national society of an economically powerful minority group whose way of life is alien, and in some respects incompatible, to the Thai way of life. How to assimilate this minority, or at least to reduce its influence nationally, is a question which has troubled a succession of Thai monarchs and prime ministers. To speak of the Chinese minority as constituting a problem is only to recognize this concern felt in varying degrees by all Thai political leaders. Yet, the Chinese living in Thailand are peaceful and self-disciplined, a thrifty and very industrious people who have made significant contributions to their adopted land—to what extent, then, can they be regarded as a ‘problem’? While the Chinese problem has many dimensions, at is first of all an economic problem, and it is precisely this aspect which looms largest for the Thai. As they see it, the Chinese, welcomed into the Kingdom years ago by a generous government, have since that time subtly undermined the livelihood of the Thai people themselves. They have driven the latter from various skilled crafts, monopolized new occupations, and through combination of commercial know-how and chicanery have gained a stranglehold over the trade and commerce of the entire Kingdom. The Thai see the Chinese as exploiting unmercifully their advantageous economic position: the Thai are obliged to pay high prices to the Chinese for the very necessities of life, and on the other hand are forced to accept the lowest price for the rice they grow. Through deliberate profiteering, according to standard Thai thinking, this minority has driven up living costs, hitting especially hard government employees on fixed salaries. It is also charged that profits made by the Chinese go out of the country in the form of remittances to China, which means a continuous and gigantic draining away of the Kingdom’s wealth. To protect their favored economic position, one hears, the Chinese have not hesitated to bribe officials, which in turn has undermined the efficiency and morale of the public service. Efforts to protect the economic interests of the Thai people through legislation have been only partially effective, again because of Chinese adeptness at evasion and dissimulation.

Most traders are inconsistent and unprofitable primarily because they are deeply intolerant of uncertainty; hence, they allow their emotions to dictate their decisions. They exhibit discipline and consistency when circumstances feel favorable, convenient, or motivating. They falter when faced with challenges, setbacks, or negative emotions. This “on and off” cycle keeps them tethered to mediocrity.

At 49, my life is the result of both calculated risks and deeply painful betrayals. As an economics lecturer at Harrington University, I teach students about market fluctuations and financial strategy. But the most profound lessons I share come not from textbooks, they come from my own personal experience with loss, betrayal, and eventual recovery. WhatsApp info: +12 (72332)—8343 Before stepping into university classrooms, I was a high school teacher at Westbridge High. Quietly and methodically, I built a $370,000 cryptocurrency trading portfolio. What started as a side project became a private triumph, a reflection of my deep understanding of economic principles, cultivated through discipline, patience, and analytical thinking. But ambition can invite envy. Email info: Adware recovery specialist @ auctioneer. net  Some of my old friends from Westbridge, once trusted confidants, became resentful as they learned of my growing financial success. That resentment turned malicious when they orchestrated a sophisticated phishing attack. It came through a seemingly harmless email. One careless click, and just like that, everything was gone. My savings, my sense of security, and my faith in people I had known for decades vanished in an instant.  The aftermath was paralyzing. Though I reported the theft, the digital trail seemed impossibly complex. I felt isolated, betrayed, and utterly lost. Then a colleague referred me to Adware Recovery Specialist, a cybersecurity firm that specializes in digital financial fraud. Within just 32 hours, they recovered my compromised email, traced the attack, and compiled a detailed forensic report. The evidence was airtight, IP addresses, time stamps, even messages exchanged by the perpetrators. Website info: h t t p s:// adware recovery specialist. com  Thanks to their work, I took legal action. Faced with irrefutable proof, my former “friends” settled quickly, agreeing to pay $300,000 in restitution to avoid criminal prosecution. Today, back at my desk at Harrington University, I bring more than just economic theory into the classroom. I teach about risk, trust, digital vulnerability, and most importantly, resilience. I share my experience not to scare, but to prepare. Because no amount of expertise shields you completely from deception. But with the right allies, even the worst chapters can be rewritten. Yes, I still trade crypto. But now, I do it with triple-layer authentication and a much more guarded heart. Every time I log into my secured accounts, I think of Adware Recovery Specialist, not just for recovering my funds, but for restoring my belief that justice, with the right team, is possible. Because sometimes, the most valuable recovery isn’t just financial, it’s personal.

But why did Rome fall? We have far too many answers. There is the intellectual answer: Montesquieu said that the Romans conquered the world with their republican principles, they changed their principles to fit an empire, and the new principles destroyed it. There is the moral answer: license, luxury, and sloth, a decline in character and in discipline. The Christian answer of Saint Augustine: Sinful Rome fell to prepare for the triumph of the City of God. The rationalist answer of eighteenth-century freethinkers: Christianity, teaching nonresistance, other-worldliness, disarmed the Romans in the face of the barbarians. The political answer: Caesarism, loss of public spirit, the failure of the civil power to control the army. The social answer or answers: the war of classes and the institution of slavery, which suppresses incentives toward change and progress. The economic answer: trade stagnation, low productivity, scarcity of gold and silver. The physical answer: soil depletion, deforestation, climatic change, drought. The pathological answer: plague and malaria, or even lead poisoning from cooking pots and water pipes. The genetic and racial answers: the dwindling of the old Roman stock through war and birth control and its mingling with Oriental and barbarian breeds. And the biological-cyclical-mystical answer: An empire is an organism, and like a living creature, it must pass through stages of growth, maturity, and decline, to death.

By definition, applying highly selective criteria is a trade-off; sometimes you will have to turn down a seemingly very good option and have faith that the perfect option will soon come along. Sometimes it will, and sometimes it won’t, but the point is that the very act of applying selective criteria forces you to choose which perfect option to wait for, rather than letting other people, or the universe, choose for you. Like any Essentialist skill, it forces you to make decisions by design, rather than default.

Around me umpteen birds are singing umpteen marvelous melodies, whistles and warbles and chirps and quavers cutting pitches high then sweep-swooping low, the pulchritudinous swimming pool sized pond glimmering picturesque in the lazy and hazy early afternoon sun. An attractive well-groomed mother duck- followed in a flawless and disciplined line by its ducklings like fluffy automatons - plies her trade alongside a young and jubilant hominid couple who, satisfactorily fulfilled to have settled and copulated once and to never again except on birthdays or anniversaries be carnal, play with their progeniture with proficiently prepared picnics loaded with an overkill of mother's home made tarts and buns and baskets of ham and cheese sandwiches; it was all sensationally Disney and dizzying and droll and not at all what this trip desired.

The Modus Operandi of THE REGULUS CONCLAVE as spelled out in 1853! “We hold such and such opinions upon one point only; and that one point is, mutual interest, and under that; 1st, that we can govern this nation; 2d, that to govern it, we must, subvert its institutions; and, 3d, subvert them we will! It is our interest; this is our only bond. Capital must have expansion. This hybrid republicanism saps the power of our great agent by its obstinate competition. We must demoralize the republic. We must make public virtue a by-word and a mockery, and private infamy to be honor. Beginning with the people, through our agents, we shall corrupt the State. “We must pamper superstition, and pension energetic fanaticism—as on ’Change we degrade commercial honor, and make success the idol. We may fairly and reasonably calculate, that within a succeeding generation, even our theoretical schemes of republican subversion may be accomplished, and upon its ruins be erected that noble Oligarchy of caste and wealth for which we all conspire, as affording the only true protection to capital. “Beside these general views, we may in a thousand other ways apply our combined capital to immediate advantage. We may buy up, through our agents, claims upon litigated estates, upon confiscated bonds, mortgages upon embarrassed property, land-claims, Government contracts, that have fallen into weak hands, and all those floating operations, constantly within hail, in which ready-money is eagerly grasped as the equivalent for enormous prospective gains. “In addition, through our monopoly of the manufacturing interest, by a rigorous and impartial system of discipline, we shall soon be able to fill the masses of operators and producers with such distrust of each other, and fear of us, as to disintegrate their radical combinations, and bring them to our feet. Governing on ’Change, we rule in politics; governing in politics, we are the despots in trade; ruling in trade, we subjugate production; production conquered, we domineer over labor. This is the common-sense view of our interests—of the interests of capital, which we represent. In the promotion of this object, we appoint and pension our secret agents, who are everywhere on the lookout for our interests. We arrange correspondence, in cipher, throughout the civilized world; we pension our editors and our reporters; we bribe our legislators, and, last of all, we establish and pay our secret police, local, and travelling, whose business it is, not alone to report to us the conduct of agents already employed, but to find and report to us others, who may be useful in such capacity. “We punish treachery by death!” (from YIEGER'S CABINET or SPIRITUAL VAMPIRISM, published 1853)

The children were given ten tokens at the beginning of the week. These could each be traded in for either thirty minutes of screen time or fifty cents at the end of the week, adding up to $5 or five hours of screen time a week. If a child read a book for thirty minutes, he or she would earn an additional token, which could also be traded in for screen time or for money. The results were incredible: overnight, screen time went down 90 per cent, reading went up by the same amount, and the overall effort we had to put into policing the system went way, way down. In other words, non-essential activity dramatically decreased and essential activity dramatically increased.

For example, Nelson Mandela spent twenty-seven years in jail becoming an Essentialist. When he was thrown in jail in 1962 he had almost everything taken from him: his home, his reputation, his pride, and of course his freedom. He chose to use those twenty-seven years to focus on what was really essential and eliminate everything else—including his own resentment. He made it his essential intent to eliminate apartheid in South Africa and in doing so established a legacy that lives on today. Creating an essential intent is hard. It takes courage, insight, and foresight to see which activities and efforts will add up to your single highest point of contribution. It takes asking tough questions, making real trade-offs, and exercising serious discipline to cut out the competing priorities that distract us from our true intention. Yet it is worth the effort because only with real clarity of purpose can people, teams, and organizations fully mobilize and achieve something truly excellent.

You go to an auto show and see some glamorous and wildly innovative concept car on display and you think, “I’d buy that in a second.” And then five years later, the car finally comes to market and it’s been whittled down from a Ferrari to a Pinto—all the truly breakthrough features have been toned down or eliminated altogether, and what’s left looks mostly like last year’s model. The same sorry fate could have befallen the iPod as well: Ive and Jobs could have sketched out a brilliant, revolutionary music player and then two years later released a dud. What kept the spark alive? The answer is that Apple’s development cycle looks more like a coffeehouse than an assembly line. The traditional way to build a product like the iPod is to follow a linear chain of expertise. The designers come up with a basic look and feature set and then pass it on to the engineers, who figure out how to actually make it work. And then it gets passed along to the manufacturing folks, who figure out how to build it in large numbers—after which it gets sent to the marketing and sales people, who figure out how to persuade people to buy it. This model is so ubiquitous because it performs well in situations where efficiency is key, but it tends to have disastrous effects on creativity, because the original idea gets chipped away at each step in the chain. The engineering team takes a look at the original design and says, “Well, we can’t really do that—but we can do 80 percent of what you want.” And then the manufacturing team says, “Sure, we can do some of that.” In the end, the original design has been watered down beyond recognition. Apple’s approach, by contrast, is messier and more chaotic at the beginning, but it avoids this chronic problem of good ideas being hollowed out as they progress through the development chain. Apple calls it concurrent or parallel production. All the groups—design, manufacturing, engineering, sales—meet continuously through the product-development cycle, brainstorming, trading ideas and solutions, strategizing over the most pressing issues, and generally keeping the conversation open to a diverse group of perspectives. The process is noisy and involves far more open-ended and contentious meetings than traditional production cycles—and far more dialogue between people versed in different disciplines, with all the translation difficulties that creates. But the results speak for themselves.

It would not be long before there were twice as many people in the world as there had been when he, Emory Frost, had been born in that quiet old manor house in Kent. And after that three times as many; and then four—and five… There would be more Restrictions, more Discipline, more Laws. And more Tyranny!…all the things he had rebelled against. There would be no escaping them, and he wondered if the world of the next century would be the better for them or the worse, and why he should never have realized before that what he had taken to be misfortune had, in reality, been luck in disguise. Incredible luck!

The job of trade unions, parties, and even radical social movements is precisely to institutionalize unruly protest and anger. Their function is, one might say, to try to translate anger, frustration, and pain into a coherent political program that can be the basis of policy making and legislation. They are the transmission belt between an unruly public and rule-making elites. The implicit assumption is that if they do their jobs well, not only will they be able to fashion political demands that are, in principle, digestible by legislative institutions, they will, in the process, discipline and regain control of the tumultuous crowds by plausibly representing their interests, or most of them, to the policy makers. Those policy makers negotiate with such “institutions of translation” on the premise that they command the allegiance of and hence can control the constituencies they purport to represent. In this respect, it is no exaggeration to say that organized interests of this kind are parasitic on the spontaneous defiance of those whose interests they presume to represent. It is that defiance that is, at such moments, the source of what influence they have as governing elites strive to contain and channel insurgent masses back into the run of normal politics.

Apple’s approach, by contrast, is messier and more chaotic at the beginning, but it avoids this chronic problem of good ideas being hollowed out as they progress through the development chain. Apple calls it concurrent or parallel production. All the groups—design, manufacturing, engineering, sales—meet continuously through the product-development cycle, brainstorming, trading ideas and solutions, strategizing over the most pressing issues, and generally keeping the conversation open to a diverse group of perspectives. The process is noisy and involves far more open-ended and contentious meetings than traditional production cycles—and far more dialogue between people versed in different disciplines, with all the translation difficulties that creates. But the results speak for themselves.

In trading, being disciplined means that you are always disciplined.

When you operate from the assumption that more or better analysis will create consistency, you will be driven to gather as many market variables as possible into your arsenal of trading tools. But what happens then? You are still disappointed and betrayed by the markets, time and again, because of something you didn’t see or give enough consideration to.

Or you can learn how to redefine your trading activities in such a way that you truly accept the risk, and you’re no longer afraid.

Where does passionate interest come from? My personal view is that it comes from the deepest level of our being—at the level of our true identity. It comes from the part of us that exists beyond the characteristics and personality traits we acquire as a result of our social upbringing.

would say that many, if not most people, grow up in a family and cultural environment that gives little, if any, objective, nonjudgmental support to the unique ways in which we feel compelled to express ourselves

This is a classic example of how we become susceptible to unstructured, random trading—because we want to avoid responsibility.

Anything we decide to do or any outward expression of behavior will be consistent with what we believe.

Finally, our beliefs shape how we feel about the results of our actions.

A few minutes after 9 p.m., the concern turned to shock as Trump opened up with a calm, disciplined articulation of his plan to boost jobs, sprinkled with a toxic dose of Hillary as the status quo. This wasn’t the P. T. Barnum version of Donald Trump; it was the Ronald Reagan version. When Hillary interjected with a canned line, “I call it Trumped-up, trickle-down,” a collective groan echoed through the Democratic universe. Trump was fresh and on point. Hillary was a day-old bagel. He went in for the kill on trade, the issue that he hoped would deliver key Rust Belt states. “She’s been doing this for 30 years,” he charged. “And why hasn’t she made the agreements better?” And he called out NAFTA, the pact so singularly associated with her husband. Hillary was in quicksand. “I will bring back jobs; you can’t bring back jobs,” Trump said. Clean, simple, to the point. Hillary countered with the mother of all establishment talking points: “independent experts” agreed with her. This was a debacle, an Opposite Day of a debate in which a commanding Trump had Hillary on her heels and backpedaling fast.

story: ignoring the reality of trade-offs is a terrible strategy for organisations.

Essentialists ask the tougher but ultimately more liberating question, “Which problem do I want?” An Essentialist makes trade-offs deliberately.

trade-offs represent a significant opportunity. By forcing us to weigh both options and strategically select the best one for us, we significantly increase our chance of achieving the outcome we want.

Mastering this Essentialist skill, perhaps more than any other in this section, requires us to be vigilant about acknowledging the reality of trade-offs. By definition, applying highly selective criteria is a trade-off; sometimes you will have to turn down a seemingly very good option and have faith that the perfect option will soon come along. Sometimes it will, and sometimes it won’t, but the point is that the very act of applying selective criteria forces you to choose which perfect option to wait for, rather than letting other people, or the universe, choose for you. Like any Essentialist skill, it forces you to make decisions by design, rather than default. The benefits

This logic holds true in our personal lives as well. When we were newlyweds, Anna and I met someone who had, as far as we could tell, an amazing marriage and family. We wanted to learn from him, so we asked him, What’s your secret? One of the things he told us was that he and his wife had decided not to be a part of any clubs. He didn’t join the local lodge. She didn’t join the book clubs. It wasn’t that they had no interest in those things. It was simply that they made the trade-off to spend that time with their children. Over the years their children had become their best friends—well worth the sacrifice of any friendships they might have made on the golf course or over tattered copies of Anna Karenina.