true dat you have to be johnny on the spot when the opportunities come, but you also have to be willing to sit for days on end. this combination of do nothing/sudden action is psychologically very tough, especially for hard working people who are inclined to feel like bums if they are not making some kind of forward motion.
but there are also some other jobs where one major part is just sitting and thinking. for example software development (one of my former jobs) - there are lots of hours or even days where you first just have to sit down and think how you could find a solution. and when you know how things should have to be done - you also do not much more than hitting keys. sitting in front of a pc many hours day by day IS a damn hard job - even if you do nothing else but watching and thinking and hit a key sometimes.
yep, but those other jobs also offer a steady paycheck and societal 'legitimacy'....someone who puts on a shirt and tie and sits at a desk in a glass building is 'obviously' at work, as opposed to someone out there on the edge doing wacky market related things that Lou Rukeyser considers unrespectable..... lots of jobs have the real gains in fits and starts, it just doesn't appear that way on a surface level. salesmen who cold call all day long make an actual sale only once every few days or even once every few months if the product is seriously high end/ large scale....businesses with huge payrolls ship out product once a month or once a quarter....there is all kinds of in between time in the business world. the trader is just fortunate enough to be able to relax in his and call it what it is....trading is capitalism purified, with all the glories and uncertainties of capitalism boiled down to the most basic scale
at the and all that counts is the result. everbody has to make money in order to survive. what we do is legal - nothing else matters. societal legitimacy - i don't give a damn about. if there wouldn't be traders - there wouldn't be brokers - and lots of people wouldn't have a job. hey - there you have it - the societal legitimacy of the bad bad traders.
During my earlier young and foolish days, I travelled the globe looking for opportunities to legitimately exploit weaknesses in the gaming industry. This ranged from counting cards to finding positive expectation games due to promotions or erroneous payout schedules. I had a backer and when I was on the job, I followed all the "rules" to a tee and was quite successful. Privately, playing for myself, I would break every rule in the book whether it was bet sizing, steaming, playing in unfavorable games etc. and generally would lose. If, for example, my backer decided that I should leave the table after losing $X, then that is what I would do without any thinking or effort. Easy as pie. And he wasn't even on the premises. When my money was on the line, sometimes you would have needed wild horses to drag me away from the table. The simple yet powerful effect of true accountability (as opposed to artificially set up accountability) was already then evident to me. rs7 hit it on the head.
'if you have a hard task, give it to someone lazy- they will find an easier way to do it.' decent book on this topic (twenty percent of it anyway): http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/A...6488098/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-5845395-2367133
yeah - i've already heard about the pareto principle. it's really amazing how it can be applied to many things in life / business / ...
i think pretty much everyone has at least heard of the 80/20 rule- if all the book did was explain the concept, it would be one page long. he talks about ideas and implications that stem from the pareto principle, along with some real life ways that he applied it, that make for interesting reading. in the last half of the book he gets into investment advice and relationship advice- obvious waste of time-but his initial ideas and observations regarding the 80/20 rule itself provide valuable food for thought. i've found that i like to spend the majority of my thinking time (80% perhaps?) reprocessing old information, with a minority of time seeking out new. Drilling the old holes deep before going onto new strikes. Depth more important than breadth, new connections superior to new information. Most concepts cannot be fully grasped and internalized in a finger snap, and oftentimes the true value of an idea only appears after much study. That may sound like Mr. Miyagi, but it's an important clue as to why the average joe is plagued by ignorance imho.