Your job is to now make a list of ten ways you gamble.
Which of these do you choose to gamble with, or are excessive, or do not even know you are gambling?
Changing perspective often helps a trader. I often call myself a provocateur (a person who provokes trouble, causes dissension, or agitates others). One that challenges norms.
Long ago in my own Floydian Therapy, as I learned my view of self, I realized just how much I gamble, how much life is a gamble, and my own tendencies to be emotional and "bet".
I am one that is addicted to anything. Alcohol. Cigarettes. Drugs. Slots. Poker, if I knew how to play it, option trading, and stock trading. I've spent much of my adult life traveling the world as a business consultant learning what not to do (drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, play slots, don't learn poker, etc). I am an excellent example of a patient, highly strung, OCD and neurotic, and calm as a cat. Depending upon the circumstances, and on "who is onstage" of my characterizations (my many selfs) , I can surprise myself by being the superb listener, and the teacher.
When students in our services take their Myers Briggs Psychological tests they learn of their personality type. It doesn't analyze the person, but if the test is taken well, it identifies traits and qualities.
I know that I had it lucky. My family was dysfunctional, but I know now that all families are.
I was brought up two blocks from Hillary Clinton, went to the same high school, same era, and I was simply a pretty well off white boy, upper middle class. I knew nothing of the world, and had no reality out of the small perfect suburban Chicago setting I had.
Drugs helped. I was a hippie. My wife and I married at 19, knew each other from Sunday School since we were 5, and have no idea how we actually got together. But we married, and moved to Michigan to educate me, and my undergraduate days are best described as filled with politics, marijuana, hash, LSD, peyote,and any mind altering drug I could find.
I've spent most of my adult life self employed, and all I've done is "sell me". This goes back to being a gambler, an addict, a provocateur, a stock trader and a world traveler.
As an adult I learned soon the art of "suiting up" and showing my education,and selling who I was, and what I knew. The art of persuasion in selling an intangible is much harder than the commodity, but when one is "selling oneself" it becomes surreal.
I have travelled to 79 countries. And now I'm old, and well known for what I've done, so it helps me to see the perspective that we repeat the same pattern over and over again, and we are always in one stage of three of a crisis.
I ramble here. Good, keep up, as you'll see perhaps more a bit of how I am able to trade successfully.
Let's get back to growing up near Hillary. Trust me, she and I had no idea of the real world.
Only when I left the circle I knew, took my young bride and ran, did I begin to see the world.
And as always the self employed, my wife never has been. She has raised our daughter and been the anchor that allows me to roam deep waters. Against all odds we've now been happily married 38 years.
I read a great deal.
I do not watch much TV.
I try to ask questions of all I meet, so I learn perspectives (however, and often so, banal and frighteningly stupid). In what I read I surround myself with people that are "of the world", not selling a sector or an "indictment" mentality (Limbaugh), and I question all facts.
I've learned that from consulting for a living, from working with clients one on one in psychological review, and from the stock market.
As you read my many rambles, please forgive me, but look for the nuggets, because at times I am so "right on" I'll surprise myself, and my read of a "gambling trade" can be finely tuned and profitable.
