I came across an interesting concept that never occurred to me in all of my own introspections and it has to do with fear and motivation. Before getting to the meat of it I need to frame the concept with an explanation of rat behaviour which can be directly mapped to humans. Rats love to play and they will work to get to an area that where they know play might occur. You can measure the level of motivation by attaching a spring to them and measuring the force they exert to pull themselves towards their goal. Similarly with food, starve the rat and place food ahead and measure the level of motivation. You then introduce fear by wafting in the smell of a cat. So now the rat is starved and also scared and wants to get out of there. So getting away from danger and also moving forward towards the goal of food are separate motivational systems. These systems can work together or they cancel each other out. Figuring out how to align the motivational forces that are driving you is something that you should be working on. You do not want a system that motivates you forward toward a goal but simultaneously blocks your way by the fear it induces. In this scenario you go nowhere because the system cancels itself out (and in most cases the fear motivation is more powerful and actually drives you backwards) You do want a system where your motivation propels you toward a worthwhile goal while your fear and anxiety chases you from behind. In this scenario you you will be maximally motivated. One way to achieve this is to ask yourself the question ‘What does my ideal future look like?’ and conversely ‘what does my future look like if I simply let everything fall apart?’ The aim of this exercise is to get the fear and motivational elements aligned so that one is pulling and the other one is pushing. So to use fear as a driving force instead of an obstacle you need to change your mode of thinking and be more afraid of not pursuing your goal than you are of pursuing. The details of it are up to you. But this is a strong framework for you to work with. All credit for this goes to Jordon Peterson. Its something I had written in my diary and thought it would be good to share here for anyone that has not yet heard of possibly the greatest thinker of our times IMO.
Interesting. Not sure this applies to trading where there's a danger in pushing/needing it. It's like you need enough motivation to not give up, yet not so much you blow up trying too hard. Thoughts?
I just ask myself what action or lack of action will I regret 5, 10 or 20 years down the road. This helps with big decisions and motivation. It is not a perfect system of course, but it has helped to prevent bad decisions and actually encourages a healthy amount of risk taking.
Yeah and that's precisely what I'm talking about. I am a motivated individual but in a disorganised way, its kind of a general malaise with me. The random nature of trading coupled with a fear of failure is a highly motivational force. An opposing motivation is the desire to achieve financial independence and freedom from 9-5 slavery. These are not the only motivations influencing you. There are always internal lynch mobs pushing and pulling on each other which establishes a dominance hierarchy and which eventfully determines your mood. So one day you say let's do this and the next day you say fuck this. If this happens to you frequently then your mental structure is not optimised but the good news is you can modify it with a bit (lot) of effort. I dont think anyone ever truly escapes from fear or anxiety and the general advice is to practice mindfulness and various other techniques to focus more on positive stuff etc ad nauseum. Its all too much hard work and did not work in my case. Better to organise your thoughts and actually start to live according to your ideal which is hard at first because your habits and routines are deeply embedded and reluctant to yield to any request for change. Something like that.