Progress vs Problem Avoidance
This is a lesson that will be crucial for many of you. There is a big, big difference between making actual progress versus putting in time and work: Progress = taking the challenging action steps necessary to make real, incremental improvements over time. Problem avoidance = putting in time that's related to your goal, but doing so in an attempt to make things easier or get to your goal faster. Here's examples of the differences... - What you do: Go through the course for a 4th time, or watch a bunch of videos on a completely different strategy hoping to discover some new revelation. (Problem avoidance) - What you should do: Create daily and weekly habits of going back through your detailed trade log to find the single biggest factor you can improve the following week. This could be your profit factor, your quantity of trades (in relation to over or under trading), or your win rate (in relation to where you're creating your plan areas). You then focus on only that thing, keeping everything else equal. Measure the result over a period of weeks. (Progress) - What you do: Increase your risk size or try to copy trade multiple evaluation accounts in an attempt to reach your income goals as fast as possible. When you get close to renewal, you take on more risk to make sure you pass or fail. (Problem avoidance) - What you should do: Focus on building a single account at a time until you have proven you're responsible in managing money like a fund manager would. This means you protect capital, make incremental gains over time, and work your way to a payout before you try to scale. You recognize that with real money you don't just "get to start over." (Progress) - What you do: Lose a trade, or a streak of trades, go on tilt, and then turn to the community to vent. Then you post screenshots of the trade asking "what you did wrong." (Problem avoidance) - What you should do: Accept that losing is a necessary and unavoidable part of the trading process. There is no right answer or solution for losing. Instead, you create daily habits around mindset and emotional control. You don't skip days working on those habits and judge your success or failure on the trade not by whether you won or lost, but by whether you did what you said you were going to do. (Progress)