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When athletes decide to try to make it the Pro Tour, there’s a dirty little secret no one tells them.
The easiest, and most surefire, way to make it to the big time is to play lots and lots of matches.
That’s why young athletes need big accounts, or sponsors.
So many future pros get derailed because they can only afford to play a few events. Eventually, the moment of truth arrives.
I don’t have enough money to keep traveling. If I don’t make the quarterfinals here, it’s over.
The pressure can be overwhelming, and the aspiring athlete may lose: not because he wasn’t good enough, but because the pressure on this one event was too high.
As the great basketball coach, Dean Smith, once said, “You can’t make every game a life and death situation. For one thing, you’ll be dead a lot.”
The same goes for trading.
If the survival of your whole account depends on one trade, there’s almost no way that trade will work out.
Either it will lose because it’s simply a losing trade.
Or it will lose because the trader panicked from all the pressure.
The way around this, of course, is to have the money to play as many events as necessary for 2-3 years.
If a wannabe pro has three years of tournaments ahead of him, no one result matters.
He can relax and just play.
If a trader has 1,000 trades ahead of her in the next few years, no one result matters.
She can relax and just take the trades.
Losing trades lose all their importance if there are more trades tomorrow.
Winners don’t become desperate hope sessions if there are 999 more trades on the horizon.
Everything settles down and the skill can come out.
The system has time to work as it should.
Don’t put all your eggs in one trade. Put some of your eggs in each of the next 1,000 trades.
Then you’ll reach your potential.
My book is called The Inevitability of Becoming Rich, and you can find that here.
