Over the past decade, we have seen several things take birth, live their shelf, and die down, life-hacks are one among those. However, these are very much alive in the trading community, whether or not this “hacks” work is a completely different story.
What is a Life-hack?
The modern-day has familiarized us all with the internet lingos, as absurd as most of them might be we sure are not unfamiliar with them anymore. Life-hack was another such phrase that sprang with the internet. Once putting up a webpage, YT channel, or any other social media page became easy, sharing cute little tips and tricks to do everyday tasks in simpler ways became more and more common. While some are simply made to entertain, some others claim to save you money and/or energy. Sure, a few are genuine and helpful but most are all about generating traffic and views. Oh, and how grateful are we to Khaby Lame to unravel those! :/
And then we advanced to the time of “fast motion” where each one is obsessed with efficiency and productivity so much that you see crash courses trending all over. “Become proficient in a language in a month”, “Learn a musical instrument as well as a professional in 6 months”, and so on. Undoubtedly these are empty promises and we seem to be moving on but there sure are a few lessons to be learned from all these trends.
The Value of Deep Work
To keep learning new things is the best hobby one can acquire, but with it, one needs to know and remember always that to achieve anything significant we have to confer, focus, time, and attention to the task, and this principle stands true in virtually every discipline. And any hints that you can get good at something without investing time, energy, and passion are simply false, for there are absolutely no shortcuts to achieving expertise! And in a world driven by frantic distractions this ability to focus is so rare that it might just seem like a superpower, which just makes it so much more important for each one of us to realize the value and work on deep work.
Deep Work in Trading
As per the world of social media, especially Twitter, there are too many life-hacks to climb up in trading. But like we already established, there aren’t any shortcuts to success. The only trick that does work is perception and focus. It would take a long time and a lot of exposure to the right kind of data to reach there. Simply put, an expert in the field might be able to see something at a glance, a student could never see, for the expert has put in his/her years into the field that student is just grazing at.
Like Adam H. Grimes rightly explains it, “Most of the ‘great truths’ in any discipline are relatively simple. If you find yourself lost in complexities then you might be on the wrong path. Reduce everything to bare essentials and start there.
For markets, those bare essentials run something like this: Financial markets are highly competitive and noisy. They move randomly or at least almost randomly most of the time. It’s not easy to make money consistently in markets. If I’m going to make money, I have to find something that gives me an edge in these difficult markets…”
Explaining it more simply, one could say the ‘trick’ lies in commitment! Commit to doing the deep work and don’t give up. You have to be engaged, passionate, and love what you do, only then would the pieces fit together.
Taking into account the ever-fluctuating financial markets, the only shortcut we could attest to success here is patience and precision!
