Trading cannot be a hobby, it's an entire lifestyle, a different way of living.

Your job is to be a prudent risk manager, an idea generator and a problem solver all in one. It will change your diet, your habits, your sleep, your relationship with others, EVERYTHING.

It becomes a game of optimising your life for trading performance, you begin to view a lot of things outside of trading with the base premise of expected value.

This is a business by design where most people will categorically fail, and with that comes a certain outlook from others on the profession you are trying to pursue. On top of that you will have family members, friends trying to pull you away from the dream you are trying to achieve. It takes a certain level of mental fortitude to overcome this.

Relentless obsession

Do not think that when starting out you will be able to sit on the beach or at your house for 1-2 hours a day learning how to make money and do it full time for a living, you will have to put in more hours than any other job out there.

Pilots, lawyers, surgeons all study for more than 6 years before they have the ability to go work in a field where there is often a theoretical ceiling on their earnings. In this business, there is no ceiling, or if there is one it is significantly higher. Anybody attempting to lure you into this business with the idea that this will be easy is fucking lying.

I want people to be prepared and not starstruck with the amount of work this is going to take, it will consume your entire life and if it doesn't in the beginning, you're doing it wrong.

People friction

To succeed you have to ignore the noise. Almost everyone around you in the beginning stages (YEARS) will be telling you this is a bad idea. The reality of it is that you will have to suck eggs for years as your results will be unproven for a while.

This is not a sign that you're wrong for taking this path of wanting to become a trader. It's the cost of wanting to make it in this business.

One of the best things you can do is stop trying to perform in order to please others, they will try to score you solely based on outcomes that they can see, which for the first few years is useless. You need to score yourself on process. Any external feedback in this sense is guaranteed to just be noise.

Their advice will be calibrated to that of the traditional world, where jobs have a clear pathway and people start off as apprentices. This business has neither.

Mental clarity

Drawdowns come with real edges, it's part of why the edge exists. Once you realise that you have the ability to hit large winning trades it becomes a game of being able to survive the gaps between them. That gap is not something you completely eliminate from a real system. It's part of how & why the edge shows up.

How you handle drawdown is something you learn over time, being able to think in the same structured manner as when your portfolio is up is a skill. A good way of doing this is attempting to approach every single session with a 'net-zero' approach. Come into every session with as clean a slate as possible ignoring all historical trades and their outcomes. This will allow you to think cleanly.

Science loop

There is no end destination, trading doesn't just become easy. It requires constant evolution in yourself and your process. Edge decay exists.

Every single professional trader I have spoken with treats this business with a degree of science, they test something review it and adjust accordingly. If you're not writing down what you did and why, there's nothing to review. In my opinion it is categorically the only way to improve, by reflecting on previous results paired with your inputs.

If you are not going to bed and waking up thinking about ways to improve every day you will NOT make it. This is a business of relentless obsession and self-improvement.

Ultimately the aim of this post is to help people understand the inherent struggles and work you are required to go through in order to make trading a full-time career. Too many people in this space as a whole will try to lure you into whatever course or group they have with the idea that success will come easily.

tldr: you need to spend hundreds if not thousands of hours staring at chart patterns, testing your OWN theses, being an impeccable risk manager and doing that whilst surviving the vaguely lengthy learning curve that trading will take you down.