The fastest-growing traders keep a daily report card that documents their mistakes. Traders who hide errors stagnate, while those who admit them and correct course accelerate their development. Mistakes are data, not shame.
For traders to have that momentum and that growth, we kinda had to think about and really observe from the traders that are developing fastest on the desk. How are they actually growing? What are the steps that they're using? What we found is if you start with your goals, that's a really nice place to go, but there's the old Mike Tyson quote, "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face," or whatever it is, right? So what you really need to do is you need to have these goals. I think goal setting's a great thing to do, but one thing we ask people to do within their daily report card, one section of your daily report card Daily report card should just be mistakes. What you really want to do is admit to the fact that you make mistakes as a trader. We all make mistakes. We're not really afraid to make mistakes on our desk. In fact, the people that make the most mistakes, as long as they're doing the right things after that, tend to experience the most amount of growth. The people that hide from their mistakes or avoid their mistakes tend to just stay very stagnant and then get into that really negative cycle really quickly.
