THE PREREQUISITES OF SUCCESS

The nature of this business requires a set of personal attributes without which I doubt anyone can build a consistently successful career as a trader, speculator, or investor.

First is a soundly based self-confidence, a realization that your mind can leam the tmth and apply it with positive results in every realm of life.

Second is self-motivation and commitment, the ability and willingness to put the time and energy into teaming what to trade and how to trade it.

Third is intellectual independence, the ability to stand on your own judgment based on the facts as you see them in the face of countervailing opinion.

Fourth is a fundamental personal honesty, a total commitment to identifying and dealing with the tmth about yourself, the markets, and your decisions.

And finally is a sincere love of what you do, the recognition that the greatest reward comes from the process of the work itself, not the money or fame that may come with it.

These attributes are fundamentally important in every area of life, but the rapid pace and volatility of the financial world make them even more critical. Without self-confidence, you will live in constant fear of making a wrong decision, and sooner or later the fear will paralyze your ability to think and make decisions. Without self-motivation and commitment, the self-motivated and committed competition will eat you alive. Without intellectual independence, you will be swept away by the changing tides of opinion into the whirlpool of financial min. Without fundamental personal honesty, your wishes will become claims on reality, and you will find yourself making choices based not on the facts, but on your wishes

211 212

and hopes. And without love of what you do, your work will become stale and uninteresting; you will lose your motivation and drive to continue.

All of these attributes are attainable, but only through a complete commitment to understanding yourself and your relationship to reality, which means understanding what you want out of life, why you want it, and how to get it. Self understanding is the compass that will guide you on the road of successful living and the beacon that will provide direction during th e inevitable times when your course is darkened and confused by fmstration and pain. But it will guide and direct you only if you are striving to move forward.

In the introduction to this section the old advisor says, "Some dream and never do. Others do and never dream. But then there are those very few who dream, and do what they dream." Look at people who are happy and successful. They love what they do first and foremost. Watching them, you get the impression that they would work without pay, that makin g money is just the gravy. For them, each day is a new challenge approached with vigor and enthusiasm. Their actions at home, at work, and in recreation are integrated into their life by a hierarchy of goals set for the hour, the day, and for a lifetime. They take action based on their passion for living and accept failure, pain, and setbacks as part of the process of moving forward, not as insurmountable obstacles. They transform their dreams into reality.

On the other hand, look at people with emptiness in their eyes, devoid of energy, plodding through each day with an embittered reluctance. They live their lives unfulfilled, either dreaming without doing until in the end even their dreams die, or doing without dreaming in mechanical, unrewarding repetition. These people have never grasped, realized in the strictest sense of the term, that their values

Success Is What You Make It

and goals are them; that in spending energy in pursuits unrelated to a well-defined and -understood self-interest, they are their own persecutor and victim, trapped in a web of their own making as prey to insecurities and fears bom of self-doubt.

We have a choice: We can decide to take control over our lives and succeed, or we can give in to fear and pain and let other people and events control us. The right choice is obvious, and making it begins with one simple commitment: CARPE DIEM!! Latin for "Seize the Day!!" This means commit yourself to the fact that each moment in life is precious, is yours, and is to be experienced with as much awareness and passion as you are capable of. It means recognize that, at any moment and in any situation, you can begin the process of change required to be and feel successful. It means grasp on to life and take hold with a devoted grip that clings to unlimited possibility. Seize the day. Dream, but dream with the conviction that you can harness the power within you and tum your dreams into reality.

THE MEANING OF SUCCESS

In a fundamental sense, success doesnt arise from ability or achievment in any one particular field. You can be a business success but a personal failure, similar to Howard Hughes, and experience your misery in style. You can also be poor but

happy, and enjoy the "simple" things in life. But given the opportunity, wouldnt most people prefer both financial attainment and personal fulfillment? I believe virtually everyone would.

I believe that, with the right motivation and commitment, every human being living in a free country has the opportunity to achieve both personal fulfillment and financial attainment.

It is strange. In a country abounding with financial opportunity there exists a love-hate relationship with money. Some people view money as something that enslaves them, thinking, in effect, "If I werent trapped by the pursuit of the almightly dollar, then I could do what I want and be fulfilled in life." Other people view money as an end in itself and spend their lives acquiring it without ever leaming to enjoy it. Ones view of money is intimately related to any concept of success. We all know the old adage which says, "Money cant buy happiness," and it is quite tme, but money maintains its allure nonetheless. Why? What can money buy?

The essential answer to this question is really quite simple: Money is a tool that allows men and women either to exchange the product of their labor for the products and services of others, or to save the results of their efforts for the future. Money is a means with which to transform personal energy into matter; a vehicle to tum dreams into reality.

We live in a time when it is almost always possible to make a career out of doing what we love. The beauty and appeal of money is that it makes so many othe r material ends attainable in the process. In this sense, the importance of money is an intensely personal issue that depends on striking a balance between the answers to two important questions. First, "What do I love to do?" and second, "What do I want materially?" If the answers to these questions are irreconcilable, then only one course is possible: change the answers! Otherwise, you are dooming yourself to a life of fmstration. It is just such conflicts, and the way to eliminate them, that I will be d iscussing in detail in the rest of this book.

I think it is possible for anyone in any endeavor to achieve a sense of total personal fulfillment and a satisfying level of financial success, and that is my idea of being a success. Success is a state of living-a condition of being alive. Success is change; it is a dynamic process of goal-directed action resulting in a constant progression of personal growth, achievement, and happiness.

Reality doesnt hand out success to a select few on a silver platter. Succ ess is self-created, not given. Life is a process. More specifically, it is a process "of selfsustaining and self-generated action." This is tme for all living organisms, from the most primitive form of plant life, to amoebas, to human beings. Life is a process of action, and to fail in this action is to die. In this sense, there is only one fundamen tal alternative and one measure of ultimate success or failure: life or death. Each action of a living being is either self-enhancing or self-destmctive. Human action is no exception, but it has one huge distinction: Each of us has to identify and define, in the unique aloneness of our own mind, the difference between life-serving and life-destroying goals and actions. We must evaluate the altematives aval table

by using the distinctive faculty given to us by nature-our rational, conceptual form of conscious awareness. 2 It is the use of the mind, what and how you think, feel, and act, that determines success or failure in life. Therefore, to take control of your life and achieve success, you have to grasp how your mind works and how to use it to achieve your objectives. THE SUPERCOMPUTER OF THE MIND

The direct stimulus for every action we take comes from our subconscious mind, not our conscious mind. When I pick up my coffee and take a sip, I essentially tell my conscious mind, "Drink coffee now," and from there my subconscious mind takes over, putting into operation countless skills that I leamed in early childhood and have practiced throughout my life.

This same process applies not only to physical actions, but also to mental actions, including thought and emotions. When I look at my charts every moming, most of the thinking and analysis that I do is nt on the verbal, conscious level. I take in the data and in effect say to my subconscious, "Look at this and see what you come up with." When I look I almost immediately know my opinions and conclusions about the market, and I could state them, but those opinions and conclusions are formed subconsciously. It is like knowing that 2 + 2 = 4:1 dont have to consciously leam the fundamentals of addition every time Im faced with the problem; the knowledge is already integrated in my subconscious mind.

The mind is like a vast and powerful computer, and as with all computers, the quality of the output depends on the quality of the input and the nature of the programming. The input consists of past knowledge and experience plus the daily events of your life. Th e output depends on how you process the information, on how you have trained or failed to train your mind to function. At any given moment, you dont have complete control over the thinking process; it is substantially automatic.

Right now, your motivation-the beliefs, values, and associations that drive your actions are already in place in your subconscious mind. You may feel in control of your actions, but actually your range of volitional control is quite limited.

Your subconscious mind is like the proce ssor and memory bank of a computer, preprogrammed by past teaming and experience. The only power you have over it is the keyboard of present conscious awareness and thought. If you are not satisfied with the output, then you have to change either the input, the content and stmcture of the programming, or, and in most cases, both.

The power of the subconscious mind is an enormous resource that, if tapped correctly, will drive you to achievement. Have you ever noticed how effortlessly sports fans leam and remember names, statistics, playing schedules, game strategies, and so forth? Do you know why? Because the subconscious mind puts a flag on the daily input which says in effect, "This is important; save for immediate recall!" Just by reading the sports page over a cup of coffee in the moming and watching games while drinking a few beers, dedicated sports fans are able to ab

sorb and integrate new and fairly complex data every day with ease. Most of them dont study intensely. Reading the sports page doesnt feel like work. They simply read or watch the game in a relaxed, but focused awareness, and the subconscious mind takes over from there. How far could you go, how successful would you be, if your mind worked that well in every area of your life?

If you are not a sports fan, there is bound to be some area in your life which you find fun and exciting in a similar way. Maybe you are one of the fortunate few who feel that way about work or your personal relationships. But for now lets assume the most likely case, which is that the area you find fun and exciting is some recreational activity like bridge, golf, or dancing. Whatever it is, when you do it, how do you feel about it? Doesnt the activity sometimes seem almost effortless, even energizing? Dont you find that you perform best when you dont consciously think about what you are doing, but instead just relax and let your subconscious mind take over? Dont you wish you could function like that most, if not all, of the time?

Youve probably had a similar experience to the following one, too. Assume you love to play golf. One day, you go out to play and everything just "clicks." You are playing the best round of your life. Every shot you hit is perfect and you are one-putting almost every green. You feel sensational but your awareness of the feeling comes in small flashes that dont interrupt your focus.

The other players keep murmuring that you are playing "out of your mind" or that you are