Sport, speed skating and trading

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdKiY92WE40?wmode=transparent]

Very interesting video and article about speed skating and about learning velocity. It is very crucial that everyone understand that trading Forex or any other market is serious business. If you want to set up a restaurant you take it seriously. If you want to become professional athlete you have to take it seriously if you want to succeed. But you have to pay the price. It is endless hours of sweat and hard work. I remember when I was a younger playing pro tennis. I had to wake up everyday and go for training. There was no: "I dont want today". There was no: "I will do it tomorrow". I had to practice since I was visiting tournaments every weekend and I had to be ready. Later it had bad effect on my psyche at that age (due to no psychological coaching but thats another story) but interestingly enough I am finding some of the tennis routines very useful while I am preparing for trading. Sport or trading. It doesn't really matter. The tools are different but the mindset has to be same because that's what matters. Psychology of trading and training is very important. And if you take trading seriously you have to train yourself. You have to twist your mind. Find your weaknesses and work on them. Make a habbit out of it. Say yourself that you have trading training three times a week. For example Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Set your objectives and set how you gonna achieve them. All has to be measurable. Accept it as part of your life. You have to be hard on yourself. If you cant go to your own training write down why. There has to be a hell of a good reason not to train today or tomorrow. Make sure that your objectives and training become a routine. Be aware ouf your daily goals and make sure you internalize your aims into your daily trading routines. If you train hard enough you are gonna make it but there is nothing like free lunch 🙂

Here is just a short part from this insightul article:

So here’s the result: five questions to determine whether you are in the zone or not.

1. Can you describe the move you’re trying to learn in five seconds or less?

2. Do you have a precise, HD-quality mental image of yourself performing the desired skill ?

3. Are you making — and fixing — mistakes?

4. Are you varying the speed of the action — slow, super-slow, and fast?

5. Are you zooming in and out, isolating your attention on a small part, then seeing how it fits in the larger picture?

If you can answer “yes” to all five of these questions — as Apolo Ohno does so vividly in this video — then the coaching consensus is that your speedometer is pegged. Congratulations: you are learning at peak velocity.

In essence, the questions revolve around three simple acts: 1) isolating an action; 2) pushing yourself out of your comfort zone, firing and fixing your circuitry; 3) combining individual actions into a fluent performance.  And it’s important to note that while athletics is the most obvious application here, these methods apply to music, math, business, social skills — even writing. After all, when it comes to learning skills, neurons are neurons (well, pretty much).

source: http://thetalentcode.com/blog/