Stop Mustarbating!!!

Stop mustarbating! Stop mustarbating! That's right. That's what I said. Stop mustarbating. Man, Chuck's really lost it today in this trader Tip Tuesday, he's talking about mustarbating. What, don't you mean masturbating? No no no, mustarbating? What is mustarbating, have you lost your mind?

Mustarbating is the belief that you must succeed at something that you desire. I'll say it again. Mustarbating is the belief that you must succeed at something that you desire, that failure is not an option. One of the most common stories you'll hear about this is the whole theory of burn the boats. There's this story of a country in South America where they came in and they were facing overwhelming odds. They were going to make land and they were massively outnumbered. They said we're going to burn the boat so there's no option, there's no going back. A lot of people adopt this belief that they must succeed. There is no going back. Today we're gonna talk about this. There's motivation and there's mustarbation. Motivation, we all are familiar with. What is motivation? Motivation is essential for trading success, without motivation you will not make it and motivation is a desire or a need that causes somebody to pursue a goal. It's the thing that drives them to go get it. Without motivation, there's no action. An individual must be motivated to achieve trading excellence and we can substitute trading for anything. An individual must be motivated to achieve athletic excellence or academic excellence or Family Excellence or marriage excellence, there has to be motivation. The thing is, is that motivation can become problematic when the traders rational wishes, wants and desires become irrational necessities or musts. This is going to rock many of yours worlds. Many of you have the belief that you must succeed and ironically, having a belief that you must succeed could be the thing that's holding you back. 

Mustarbation. Mustarbation occurs when someone becomes all consuming about trading and they believe that in trading, they must become successful as a trader, to be loved or accepted by others or some other meaning they attach to it, they must succeed as a trader, for their self esteem. When you are operating from a place that you must do something for your self esteem, it actually sets you up for underperformance, or even worse, massive failure. Now, mustarbation is the root of almost all emotional evil. Anxiety, anger, frustration, and depression almost always have a must lying underneath the feeling and when we start to behave with mustarbation thoughts, we say things like this trade must do well, I must make money today, I cannot afford to take another loser and things become absolute. They have to happen. I'll share a quick story with you. I had a belief when I was in high school, I love the game of basketball and I had big goals in basketball. I wanted to go and get a division one scholarship and go play at a major program in college basketball, so I had these big goals to do that. What's interesting is between my junior and my senior year, I went to a series of invitational only basketball camps where I played with the best players in the country. Players that went on to become college stars, players went on to become NBA stars and I played in these games against these amazing players. Everything I worked for came to fruition at these camps. I was an all star at every camp I went to, I started to be noticed by all kinds of schools that now Ever heard of me before and started recruiting me and I came home that summer from the camps, feeling really amazing about myself, feeling like I had arrived. Now remember, I still had to play my senior year. I took a week or two off at the end of the summer just to heal my body and then when school started, word had gotten out of how well I had done over the summer and when I went back to school, there was a couple of big things that were happening. One, because word got out. I thought people would respect me, I thought that if I was a great player, I would get respect from my teammates, I'd get respect from other players. What I got, I didn't bargain for, which was instead of getting respect, I started to be challenged, confronted by all kinds of players around my city that kind of like, Oh, you think you're a big deal? You ain't nothing. I'm gonna take you down, I'm going to humiliate you. I started having people come after me. I didn't expect that and I didn't respond well to it. I had a belief that being successful as a basketball player would get me respect. 

The second belief I had was that if I was successful as a basketball player, it would get me girls. It would get me sex. I would be loved by girls and at that point, I was shy. I figured, well, if I was a great player, kinda like the whole groupie thing, right? If you're a rock star, girls that come to you, if I'm a great player, girls that come to me. When school started, there were no girls that were dying to be my groupies. There were no girls pursuing me. It was the exact same as before the summer began and so all of a sudden, I had people challenging me, I wasn't getting attention from girls and then I didn't play well and I didn't play well because I wasn't comfortable confrontation. I didn't play well, because I was rusty and then very quickly, I accelerated my failures in my mind. When I missed a shot, it wasn't just that I missed the shot, it was that I was killing myself esteem. When I missed a shot. I was missing my chance of ever having love or having a girlfriend. These are the kinds of things that were going on in my mind and so I spiraled rapidly and of course, as I spiraled that actually intensified the criticism I was getting from people around me. They clearly got it wrong. How is this guy in all star? He sucks. I remember at one point, I called one of the guys that ran one of the all star camps and I called him and I talked to him about getting recruited and I'll never forget what he said to me. He said me putting you on my all star team made me a laughingstock. It made me a laughingstock. I lost respect from other people, because I put you on all star team. There's no way I'm putting in any kind of good word for you. It's literally what he said to me. I was crushed. Everything unraveled in a hurry. As it unraveled in a hurry, I found myself sitting on the roof of a 27 storey building. Looking down, just pondering, wondering, should I jump? A very short period of time I went from the peak of my confidence to the lowest of lows where I actually was contemplating suicide. How could that happen so fast? It happened because I was mustarbating. Everything I did around basketball was a must. It gave me no room for error and then when I did fail, because I had no room for error when I did fail, it was catastrophic. I see this in traders all the time. People come to trading for their financial hope. That trading is going to be the thing that saves them financially and puts them in a position ironically, where they burn all their capital, they burn all their savings trying to make it and as this happens, they get more and more freaked out. Which makes them trade worse and worse and at the end it's not even a question about their tactics or their knowledge or their desire. Those things are all there. They're so fucked up in their head that they cannot think straight.

When we think these thoughts of mustarbation, it puts enormous pressure on us, you can sense this in the story I just told you. In turn, this leads to over arousal or under arousal. Most of the time over arousal. When we're too amped up, when we're too stressed, when we're too angry, when we're filled with rage, and we're frustrated, we do not think clearly. Blood literally rushes to our brain that actually distorts our thinking, raises our brainwaves and we can not think clearly. This leads to what I call binary decision making, where we just focus on one outcome again, and again and again.  In this one outcome, like if I'm long in the market, say I'm long Microsoft, all I can focus on is that I'm long Microsoft, and should I sell it? Or should I hold it? Should I sell it? Or should I hold it? Should I sell it? Or should I hold it? It's all I can think about? I'm not thinking about I could sell half, I could sell quarter, I could buy puts against it, I could sell calls against it, I could sell call spreads against it, I could sell Google against it. I could sell NASDAQ against it. I can get out of Microsoft entirely and go by google or Go by meta. I'm not thinking of these things. As a trader, one of the reasons I call it the trading matrix, is there a matrix. There is a matrix of possibilities around you that is literally almost infinite. You cannot even count how many things you could do. If you ever doubt me on this, challenge me and I'll go through it and I will go, I will go on a rant and we will take your position and we will run it and run it and run it and run it and run it and run it and I will show you so many combinations of what you could do with the position. It will blow your fucking mind. That we're all locked up on one thing, one thing. Do I stay long? Or do I get out? See, in that moment, you're fucked no matter what you do. Because if you sell it and it goes up, you fucked up. If you don't get out and it goes down, you fucked up. You're going to beat yourself up, no matter what and you're fucked. Now, because you've made it a must, Not only is the trade going to be a loser, but now in your mind, you're going to lose your marriage. Your kids are going to hate you. You're going to lose your health, you're going to lose your house, you're gonna lose your cars, your friends won't talk to you anymore. You'll be outcast from your peer groups and you'll be homeless on the street, begging at a stoplight for somebody to give you $1. That's how you mentally go. It's bullshit, by the way, but that's where you mentally go and it scares the living shit out of you. You think you're gonna make good decisions when you're in that frame? Oh, no way. The good news is, is we're not done with this discussion. When you come back next week, we're going to talk about how we address this. We're going to talk about how we never mustarbate again. You know on Trader Tip Tuesday, I show you techniques to help you take your performance to an elite level, including never mustarbating again. Check back next week and we'll continue. Bye