#60 - The 2 Things You Need To Be Successful

Hey everyone, Kirk here again at optionalpha.com and welcome back to the daily call. Today’s daily call was one of my favorite topics and we’re going to be talking about the two things that you need to be successful. I have 100% mentioned these numerous times on webinars, probably on podcasts. I don’t even know. Probably on this daily call before because I don’t remember all of them that we’ve done exactly and what I’ve mentioned before. I know we haven’t covered this topic specifically, but I might have mentioned it before. But the only two things that you need to be successful are consistence and persistence. I firmly believe this. I really, 100%, true to my core, down to my gut, deep inside of me believe that those are the only two things that you really need to be successful at whatever you do because I didn't say successful at trading, I said successful. I’m a geek… Many of you know this. I’m a geek, I’m a nerd. I totally geek out on studying people who are successful and companies that are successful and countries that are successful. I totally geek out on that stuff. The common thread between all of that is always consistence and persistence. I want to break this down for you, so you understand how I look at it. This is part of the reason why I do the daily podcast now and why I do this daily call. The first one is you’ve got to be consistent and that's really consistent in doing the right activities that will lead to success. Consistence can be anything that you can do. It’s basically a habit. If you think about consistence, it’s really effectively a habit. Your brain as much as humanly possible tries to reduce energy and reduce strain and the best way that it does that is through habits. If you can develop a habit and have a consistent track record of doing the right thing, eventually, your brain takes over. Your brain switches gears and turns it into a habit. You probably didn’t think about this morning getting up out of bed and brushing your teeth. You didn’t think about how you brush your teeth. Like I'm doing this in the microphone, like you guys see me brushing my teeth, airbrushing my teeth. But I’m saying you didn’t think like – “Okay, I brush the left side and then I brush the right side, then I turn it.” It just happens. You probably do almost the exact same motion without even thinking about it. Researchers have actually studied people who brush their teeth and comb their hair and put on their shoes. They do almost the exact same motion for the exact same amount of time without even thinking about that. How is that humanly possible? How is it possible that we can do like brushing our teeth can be down to seconds consistently for like months at a time the exact same motion? Because it's a habit. Because we developed that habit. We have that consistency. What you should be trying to do in all aspects of your life is just be consistent. Just be there. Be present. People have often said that you don’t have to be smarter than someone. You just have to beat them to the spot. You don’t have to be the valedictorian. You don’t have to be the smartest person in the class. You just have to be earlier than everyone else. You just got to beat them to the spot and always get there. Never miss a day. That’s part one, consistency, doing the right activities. The second part here is persistence. This is the toughest part. This is truly I think the toughest part for people in anything that they do, especially trading. It’s the persistence to do the same activity over and over again when you don't feel like doing it or when you face some sort of pushback. I’ll give you an example of this with regard to trading because I think this was really helpful. I see people all the time who sign up for our membership and go through our free training and go through our free courses. We lay out everything. We tell them what the edge is, we tell them how to do it. It’s step by step in the tracks. It's all there for them. I get a bombardment of emails every single month from people who ask me basically… This is the overarching question that they ask. “If it's this easy, why isn’t everyone doing it?” My reply to them is always generally the same. It's easy to be healthy and fit. You have to go to the gym and you got to eat right. That’s easy. There’s no guesswork involved in that. The mechanics could be different. You could run versus lift weights. You could do swimming versus biking. The mechanics don’t matter. But it’s easy to be in shape and be healthy. You go to the gym, you work out and you eat right. Now, that’s not rocket science. You can learn that. The only hard part about that is the persistence or the actual activity of going to the gym when you don’t feel like it, of picking up an apple when you want to have ice cream. That's the hard part. In trading, people always say like, “Kirk, this stuff is so easy. Why isn’t everyone doing this?” I’m like, “You’re right. Why doesn’t everyone do this? That’s why we’re doing this. That’s why I’m doing this podcast. That’s why you’re listening to me right now because I think everyone could do this.” There’s plenty of room in this market for this market to explode and expand and for options trading to be exponentially bigger market than it is right now. More people will eventually get into it, but the people who are going to be successful are the ones who are persistent in doing the right thing day after day, going through a losing trade and still trading, going through a drawdown and still trading. Heck, even going through a really good string of profitable trades and not increasing your allocation size, not becoming overzealous and assuming that you have found the golden goose, that you've found the fountain of youth and keeping your position size in check, looking at a setup and even though it looks really good and even though you’re salivating at how good the setup looks, to keep your position size in check. It’s that persistence in doing the right thing over and over and over again that always wins out. That’s why frankly, I have started doing these daily podcasts, these daily calls because I wanted to have yet another thing that I had to do every single day that kept me on track. Running this website and doing these calls and doing the strategy calls and doing the webinars and doing the video updates every single night keeps me on track. By keeping me on track, it's made me a thousand times better of a trader than maybe I would’ve ever been had I just tried to do this by myself. Hopefully that helps out tonight. Hopefully you take two of these things, these two major things and apply them somewhere in your life. I don’t care if it’s trading. I don’t care if it’s in finances. Maybe it’s in relationships. Maybe it’s at your job. Maybe it’s with family members or whatever the case is. Apply it somewhere and I think you’ll see a dramatic, dramatic improvement. Until next time, happy trading!

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