Adapt or Fail: Building the Mind for Success in Trading

Everybody has experienced natural selection of evolution in trading. Everybody. Trading is a perfect laboratory to be able to look at evolution and particularly adaptation. What I want to do is not get sciencey on you, but I want to talk about how powerful of an event that you've walked into. When you trade, when you trade.

You are taking a mind that was developed through millennia to be able to control outcome, to win, to make things happen and to not lose. Why? Because if you couldn't handle that, if you couldn't control outcome, the environment and lost, you became somebody else's meal, somebody else's energy supply, somebody else's power. Yeah. And what happens is that we evolve to the point where, where we really became a dominant species and we don't even think about what we've brought into the world from six and a half million years plus. Then we get into trading. All that skill set about winning, okay? All that hating to lose and wanting to make things happen that has served you so well as traits, okay? As traits, they certainly turn against you in trading. Why? The environment's changed. The rules of success in trading are enormously different than the rules of success in the jungle. And here's the deal. Remember that jungle wants you to win, wants you to make things happen. Doesn't want to lose, really, truly wants to be in control, okay? That making things happen, that winning and trading.

Is very different. It's a probability based world. Whereas this ordinary world that we live in and adapted to is really more of a certainty world. It looks certain, we make it feel certain. But what happens is that in trading it busts that illusion. You find out that no, really the world's very uncertain and we are very unprepared evolutionary for this fact. Trading is uncertain. Your regular life, you know, you can make things happen, you're in control, blah, blah, blah. In trading, you're not in control, you're in probability. And what happens is your brain comes in, hits that it fails.

And here's the deal. Failing is okay. However, if you fail to adapt, you perish. And guess what happens a lot in trading? They don't know how to adapt, don't even know they need to adapt. And they keep failing and yet failing.

And evolution is the signal for adaptation to come forward. You need to adapt to the new circumstances or you perish. And so the deal is, how do you go about adapting to a world, an alien world that you were, you just didn't even know existed? You show up in it. The deal is the most successful species is not the biggest, the strongest, the Smartest. It's the most adaptable, the one that can adapt. When the world changes, can they adapt to it and move forward, or are they stuck there? Okay. And most traders get stuck in a particular world, a particular way of viewing the world that doesn't serve them in this new world they walked into of probability of uncertainty. In trading, there is no control over certainty. There is no control that you can force your habit. And besides that, you don't control whether or not you win or lose. Oh, boy. Winning gave our caveman ancestors a sense of power, authority, gave them status and safety. However.

Suddenly, your single self can't do that. You exist as a probability of winning or losing. The brain freaks out on that. It's not prepared for that. It hasn't been adapted for that. And all of a sudden, you go in and you find yourself, oh, my God, I'm failing. And I start triggering to fight flight. And then I perish. My money blows up. And before you know it, many, many traders end up outside of trading because they lose their life, they lose money, capital, their capital, and they're perished from the environment. Now, the adaptive trader, the adaptive organism, is going to say, oh, what I've been doing isn't working. I need to adapt. What does that look like? Well, at the very core of it.

Once you grasp, oh, this is really about managing uncertainty. It's about developing beliefs about my ability to manage the challenges of uncertainty that are simply part of my day in trading. That brain wasn't there before you showed up. In trading, you're going to have to adapt. You're going to have to build that brain that produces the mind that is comfortable with uncertainty, with not being in control of winning or losing, and also not making things happen. The new trading mind has to be disciplined.

Patient, impartial when facing loss. And guess what? You're thinking, I hate losing. I just. I'll do anything but lose. Well, you're going to perish. In trading, what you discover is you have to become an enormously good loser. You have to keep the losses small. You don't give your life away. This is how you become successful. In trading. You see the adaptation from the world that you were in. And no matter how successful the way you were back then was, it doesn't matter. You're in a new world. You wake up, you buy into this trading stuff, and suddenly, you know, you have the knowledge, you're seeing intellectually that, oh, yeah, I understand, this is probability. Da, da, da, da, da, da. But then you get into the game and find out your body, your brain, your caveman brain just doesn't know. It doesn't buy in to that probability stuff. It wants the certainty of survival. It wants the power to make things happen. And yet it has to become a very patient hunter. It has to be moving from like the African lion that stalks, takes down big prey and also has heavy losses. And you have to transform that kind of hunting into what the American cougar does. The American cougar is enormously patient. It waits to see what the forest will give it. Then it attacks, but by stealth, it's an ambush. Completely different. So you begin to see, oh, man, these two brains and minds are very different. You as a human being have the gift of being in charge of your own adaptation. That's really unique. Now the question is, are you going to do it? Then how do you adapt trying harder by being tougher, getting more knowledge? No, no, you have to understand emotion. Emotion is not what you think it is. It's a biological action potential. And it coordinates action between you, the trader, and the environment, the markets. That's the deal is you're going, oh, and they happen blazingly fast. What you have is you have a set way that your brain has. When it engages uncertainty, what happens? It feels vulnerable, it feels confused, it goes ape, it goes to fight flight. And all of a sudden you start making very irrational decisions. That's at the very core the belief that you couldn't handle it. The powerlessness of actually facing uncertainty. You're going to have to learn in the probability mind that power is patience.

Power is being a very, very good loser. Okay? So if you keep the losses small, you don't go ape, okay? And you maintain, you maintain disciplined, patient authority. Yeah. That can be taught. Friends, what I encourage you to do is we're having, we're having a group course soon. And what I'm asking you to do is go take a look at that. Go to my website, look at that and start saying, do I want to adapt to this world that I'm involved in or do I want to make things happen my way? Well, if you want to do that, good luck. It may be that you find a way through it. Most likely, that's the failure. That's the parish of evolutionary psychology. Or what you can do is say, what are the tools I need to learn to be able to adapt? Not just my emotion, but also my beliefs about my ability to manage the uncertainty, the challenges of life. How can I go about adapting those for this new world of trading so that I can find success in it. Friends. Come and see, Come and see. Check out this root force.

Sa.