Creativity

What we know about creativity is that it is at least a two-step process consisting of:  1) a period of immersion in a domain, where people absorb all they can about the world (analysis); and 2) a period of stepping back, where people can reflect upon what they’ve learned and put their observations together into new views of the world (synthesis).

Creativity starts with a wealth of raw materials derived from intensive observation but doesn’t blossom until there is an opportunity to synthesize what you’ve analyzed into a fresh perspective.

What a nice parallel to the trading world. As Brett points out, to have both, you need to spend the time of analysis wisely. Staring to charts long hours without having a clear goal is not good enough. Bacause you would lack the quality downtime that is also very important. For that reason, spent your analysis time with maximum focus. To sum it all, here is the last quote which describes these words:

Creative productivity requires intensive work and quality downtime.  Indeed, from my perspective, one of the greatest performance problems traders face is both a lack of intensive, quality analysis time and a lack of quality downtime.  Traders stare at screens and flit from chat to chat without truly doing the deep analytic dives.  At the same time, they tell themselves that dedication to trading requires that they not take too much time away from markets.  As a result, their analyses and syntheses are lacking.

Thank you Brett for an insightful article.

source: traderfeed.blogspot.cz