In Part 1 of this series, I talked about a surprising thing that the top performers in any field do differently than the rest. In this part I’ll be sharing the strategy that builds on this knowledge, and which has helped me accelerate my own learning curve and increase my largest profit days.
By the end of this post you should have a practical method for speeding up your learning, while improving your overall results by becoming better at what you do best. If you’re a developing trader, this could be what pushes you to profitability. If you’re already a consistently profitable trader, this can help take you to elite performance.
The Method
Simple principles can often prove very powerful when put to use. I think you’ll find this method to be simple, and its effects to be highly beneficial.
In Part 1 I told you to do an inventory of your strengths. Particularly, which types of market environments and set-ups do you have the best results with? And which character traits / abilities contribute to your out-performance in these instances? Once you have those, here’s what you simply do:
Each time you reach a new ‘best day’ or ‘best trade’, instantly set a new goal to beat that mark.
You mean that’s it? No complicated strategies? Yes, that’s it. But don’t be fooled; this simple method will start a chain reaction of inevitable consequences that are about to take your game to another level.
The Benefits
To understand why this method is so powerful, let’s think about what happens when you instantly and perpetually set new goals to beat your best performances.
When you want to always better your best, you have to figure out how to improve your skills. So when you have these constant goals, it acts like fuel to push you far beyond what you’d ever normally do. Now you’re no longer satisfied with your good performances. Instead you’re instantly trying to figure out what you’ll need to learn to beat them. And since this is your goal, you won’t believe how much more you’ll push to learn.
Instead of stopping and resting when the market closes, now you stay at your desk and review the day and the trades. After all, you have to beat your new best mark next time around. What could you have done better? What subtle market behavior did you miss? How could you catch it next time? What mistakes did you make? How could you avoid them next time? What things did you do right? How can you do them even more right next time? Put more size on at the right time? Enter earlier? Don’t scale out? Add another trade at certain point? The possibilities for improvement are endless. Both in terms of learning to read the market better, and learning to execute on your insights better.
But something else happens when you use this method instead of being satisfied with your best performances: you start pressing it more when you recognize your ideal trading conditions. In fact, you become better at recognizing those ideal conditions to begin with. Since you’re constantly studying them, you become adept at detecting when they’re likely to occur. And since you want to beat your best, you don’t stop trading when you’re up a nice profit for fear of losing it. No. Now you’re on a mission. Fear of regret gets thrown aside as the bigger regret becomes not beating your best when you had the chance. And given that one of the biggest hidden weaknesses traders have is quitting while they’re ahead for fear of giving back the profits (even though this is often the best time to press it) , you simultaneously remove this weakness.
That’s the power of this simple method. It sets a whole virtuous chain of events in action. And knowing that you have a ‘best mark’ to beat, your focus also increases and becomes laser-like. In the end, and somewhat ironically, you not only end up improving your strengths, but in the process you improve your weaknesses too, and get better on the whole.
The Action Plan
So now that I’ve shared with you this powerful strategy, it’s time to go put it to use. From Part 1 you pinpointed your specific strengths. You know when you’re at your best. Now each time you hit a new best performance level (whether on a specific type of trade, day, or period of favorable market conditions), enjoy and reward yourself but instantly set a goal to beat the new mark. You may not achieve it for a while, but the benefits that are brought about from striving to do so are what matter.
If you constantly follow this plan of action, you should find your learning curve accelerating, and your largest profit trades and days increasing, as you capitalize more on your strengths and improve overall.
What methods do you use that have helped you accelerate your learning and improve your performance? I’d love to hear about them in the comments below.
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