Let me start off by asking you a question: do you enjoy failure? Yeah, that was the question.
Do you enjoy it? Here’s another one, are you good at it? These may sound like strange questions, but you know what, you need to be. Here’s why the best traders LOVE failure.
I’m asked all the time, “Rob, isn’t failure a bad thing?” You know what, most failure is, and here’s why, because most people will fail at something, you don’t do good at bowling, you don’t do good at asking somebody out on a date, you don’t do good at something, and they give up.
They never try to do it again because “I’m not good at archery, I’m not good at fishing, I’m not good at bowling,” so they won’t do it any longer.
See, but there’s something called “successful failure,” and what success failure is if you fail at something, you go out and you make a mistake, and you don’t do well on something you do it again, but you learn from it.
You build upon that mistake, on that error, and make it better the next time, and it’s a steppingstone where you continue to do better with it. I love the comments that Edison made when he was asked,
“How do you feel Mr. Edison failing over 2000 times on the light bulb?” His answer was brilliant, “I didn’t fail 2000 times, I found 2000 ways it doesn’t work, but I didn’t fail 2000 times.” You see, he learned from his failures, he learned how to improve upon that light bulb.
Failure’s not a bad word unless you make it a bad word.
So you have a choice – what do you want to do? When I teach my workshops one of the phrases that I use all the time is “whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.
” I had one of my students that came to me one time and said, “Rob, I thought about quitting trading probably 100 times, and every single time I thought about it I thought about you and at the workshop, and that phrase he said ‘whether you think you can or you think you can, you’re right.’
And I swore that every time you said that in the workshop you were looking right at me, right in my eyes.” She said, “And I wasn’t going to give you the satisfaction of quitting, and I did it in spite of you.
” I said, “Oh gee, how bad was that for me to push you to that level that now you’ve become you’ve become successful at it in spite of yourself?”
Success and failure, go hand in hand together. The best traders out there have built a trading system that has learned from their failures.
You’ve taken the things that maybe you’re not very good at, and you’ve built it into a system that you can protect yourself.
You’re not going to stop trades from going against you. I absolutely guarantee you will have trades go against you,
and if you consider that a failure you’re making a mistake because if you go into the trade saying, “Listen, my goal is to get in here,” let’s say it’s at $100, “And my profit target is $110, and my stop, if I’m wrong is at $98, I’ve got a very limited risk in the trade that if it goes to $98 that was a good trade.”
“But Rob, you lost money.” No, no, no. It’s not losing money, it’s the cost of doing business.
If you’re going to have lunch today and you spend $10 on lunch do you tell people you lost $10 on lunch? No. You knew lunch was going to be $10, it cost you $10. That $2 cost from when the stock went from $100 to $98 that was the cost of doing business, that was the cost of the trade.
The best traders in the world fail to their own success. If you truly want to be a successful trader here’s what I would suggest, click here for our free training where we teach you what it takes to become a master trader,
to become a successful trader. We hope this helps you to reshape your thinking on why failure is a good thing.