I am just looking for some motivational stories. If you know any good motivational stories, please post them. Also, if you would like to share your own success story, please feel free to do so. Thanks! PA
Let me begin: "Caryn Johnson, aged 15, living in Harlem, being poor & unattractive, was a fine example of 'loser.' With a baby daughter, no husband, she had to go on welfare, although she hated the idea. She and her child had to eat. This young teen mother, not even old enough to drive, became a drug addict. She did unspeakable things to get drugs, often with her daughter present. It got so bad that they both ate out of garbage cans. Five long years of welfare. Finally put the kid into daycare, and got a job putting makeup on people in a local playhouse. Didn't take too long to lose the job. Got another job putting makeup on people in a funeral home. Ghastly work, but she was hungry, and determined to make it on her own. Lost that job, too. Caryn talked to her 5-yr old daughter, and said, "Honey, let's start a fresh life, changing everything." She began simply enough: taking a step EVERY day. They moved out of NY, and started again. Three years -- just about one thousand days -- later, after taking just about 1000 more steps than you, she repaid NY City's Welfare Department every penny she had accepted. Caryn Johnson had the same tool as you: a decision to ask better questions, and take at least one step every day. Period. She tapped into the amazing power of NOW. It's the reason why, after she became the highest-paid woman in Hollywood, you might have recognized the new name she adopted... Whoopi Goldberg."
No, she didn't join ET and she doesn't trade, but I just thought it was a great motivational story for traders who are struggling to fulfill their dreams.
Surely you can imagine the burdens of a particular woman... to give birth to a child afflicted at birth with what we now know as autism. Even after learning that several doctors agreed that she had to institutionalize the child, she said, "No way." Disruptive and self-destructive, he couldn't even be hugged or kissed. Doctors and specialists repeatedly told her she had to institutionalize her son. She refused. His unruly behavior at school was so egregiously disruptive he wasn't merely suspended, he was thrown out of his school. Permanently. Then another school expelled him... and another. His speech defect, and the flat feet which excluded him from athletic pursuits, and the mocking of the other kids, all added up to a ton of pain. That pain was expressed as disruptive behavior. He was eventually kicked out of seventeen schools. Can you imagine what it must have been like? How understandable to make the decision to give up on him? How much can a parent take? What hope for a productive future can such a child's parents expect? They felt as if they were running out of schools. They finally found a place for him in a private Swiss school. It was neither inexpensive, nor simple to accomplish. The certainty of accomplishment is vastly improved by the persistence of fierce love, of dedication to a child. At his 18th school he discovered a fascination with, and love of, art. It calmed him considerably. His interest and curiosity grew. **************** Back in the States, with a family of his own to feed, he struggled and struggled. One of the better answers he came up with was that, however rough things were in his life, he hadto spend at least a couple of hours per week trying to express his artistic side. In those minutes reserved just for his creative side, he wrote a screenplay that attracted interest. Broke as can be, he actually turned down a whopping $250,000 for the script, because the buyers wanted the script outright. He refused to let go of the script unless he could also direct the movie!! Wait, it gets better: He wanted to star in it, too! When your electric bill is unpaid, your refrigerator and cupboards empty, a quarter of a million dollars is one whale of a pile of money. His desire to direct and star in his creation was so great that the short-term challenges of physical hunger, pressure from the electric company to pay his bill or face turnoff, not to mention his wife and family, were factors he decided he had to tolerate in order to make his dream come true. Know for sure that you've got to have a dream if you're going to make a dream come true. Put a date on it, and it's not a dream anymore. It's now called a goal. At 20 million dollars per movie, the guy who refused to sell that script won his battle, developing fame as "Rocky."
NO MATTER WHAT COMPANY YOU WORK FOR, 20% of all the employees produce 80% of the results. These people earn, on average, 4x the income of those in the bottom 80%. When you are in the top 20% of the top 20%, you are now in the top 4% THESE people earn, on average, 16x the earnings of those in the bottom 80% When you are in the top 20% of the top 20% of the top 20%, you are in the top .08% THESE people earn, on average, 52x the earnings of those in the bottom 80% They do NOT produce 52x as much, They do NOT produce 16x as much, They do NOT produce four times as much as you. The horse that wins a race takes home DOUBLE what the second-place horse earns and and more than four times what the third place horse gets to take home. The winner does not run twice as fast, and doesn't even have to beat the second and third-place horses by much. In fact, the winner will earns double and more even if he only wins by a fraction of a second!. The first horse to win a million dollars was a horse named Achmed. (Actually, the horse didn't win a dime... his owners did, since banks still refuse to honor a horse's hoofprint as a signature). A newspaper reporter compared the earnings of Achmed, and another horse that also ran in every race that same year as Achmed. How useful to YOU to learn that, although Achmed earned over a million dollars that year, the other horse earned just about one hundred thousand dollars... a TEN to ONE ratio -- even though Achmed did not run anywhere NEAR ten times faster than Achmed. In fact, in all of the races that they both competed in, there was only an eight percent difference in their times. Not ten times faster, not even five times faster, or even twice as fast. Eight percent faster.
"The best way to achieve a small fortune in trading is to start with a large fortune." Seriously, this is going to be the final result of almost everyone here who really tries to do this. Motivational stories, books, sim trading, etc. are still going to leave almost every newbie trader with serious losses. People need to stop treating like this a wealth hobby, and realize that less than 1% will ever seriously succeed. You either are willing to put in the 8,000+ hours and $$$ tens of thousands of losses, and still be willing to fail, or they can delude themselves into thinking "a few months, read a few hundred ET posts, a $5000 account, and I am there" As a minister once said - "you should try as hard as possible to do anything besides becoming a minister first. But if you still are left with the situation where nothing else seems right..."
ha! I have him on ignore so i dont usually see his sh*t unless hes quoted. As soon as I saw the headline I knew he would be on here saying the most negative things he could think of ! Its hilarious! lol Jim
You are more than welcome to prove it untrue. Motivate works two ways. You can convince yourself something is untrue and find out the hard way. Or you can sit down and decide whether you will face the reality of the task ahead and decide if its worthwhile. You can try to become a doctor. But you have to overcome the hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition, the herculean task of trying to get in, the huge problems of malpractice and nonpayers and dealing with employees and legistlation and trying to cram hundreds of patients in to make a profit and other things, and then make an informed decision. What do the price action people here say? 8-12,000 hours of screen time, and even then, no guarantee. Of course, you cannot work during these multiple years... The studies, the overwhelming number of charlatans with books and advisories that have no edge, the constant complaints of ET newbies desparate for any scrap that will help them become somewhat profitable, and a whole lot of other things testify that this is a very very very very low success field. But if you want to publish 2 years of your broker statements and show us how profitable you are and that this is so easy, then go ahead by all means.