Everybody Michael Martin the number one. This is number two one Question I get is Mike I can’t sit still. I’m too fidgety.
I can’t quiet my mind. I’m not flexible I can’t do yoga blah blah blah blah blah. So I look at that as all one kind of question about meditation Yet you read You know about all these people who do transcendental meditation and how benefit it is beneficial It’s been how it’s changed their life doesn’t that and you can’t find a way to make it work for you So I’d liken this to to trading larger, right when you think about you know, the monks who can sit there for hours They didn’t start that way they started small and then they trained their mind to quiet down Now I promise you Dalai Lama has monkey mind every once in a while, it’s the nature of things We’re picking up stimulus things.
We can smell here. See we can feel heat. We can feel humidity.
I can feel coldness You can feel other people’s energy, right? so My intro to to to quieting my mind came through Hatha yoga I’m going through you know, what my teacher Eric Schiffman would say Yoga is a moving meditation At the beginning. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know how to move my body through space I didn’t know how to do it in jiu-jitsu either, but you take it a day at a time and you learn You learn a little more so When you want to learn to quiet your mind I think of it as a way of managing your focus now I have to go I can’t go from night Today back tonight in one gigantic leap.
I’ve got to prepare I kind of dim the lights here. I have lights on you can’t see them, but I have those I Have lights that aren’t so bright but are soft for recording Even though it’s daylight. I have a backlight so they don’t cast a shadow for the other lights So when you’re thinking about mmm Trying to settle down and quiet the mind think about a couple of things that might help one is If there’s a lot of outside noise, it’s hard to try to be quiet when something like that is annoying you If you can dim the lights You know put on the kitchen light or the oven light the stove light quiet everything down And sit still You don’t even have to close your eyes.
Just sit still for like a minute gather your thoughts from there if You still have trouble what I often do is I’ll start to pull out one of my notebooks and I still have these ones from Moleskine these are moleskine from Columbus Circle. They have a little store there I actually have this one too, which is like a daily planner For 2026 that I bought it at the same store last November Then I have this big one this one says Portfolio Accelerator, thanks to JC Peretz and Mary so What I’ll do is I’ll say okay, let me dive into my meditation, but where’s a good place to start, okay? Let me just take a little bit of an inventory about what I can be grateful for today now some people call this a great Gratuity a grateful list what am I grateful for? What I try to do is just one or two sentences of like here’s what really worked today. Here’s what I’m excited about Here’s what I want to pick up tomorrow, right and it already starts to change my energy when I talk about things that way Why do I bring this up because it’s important that you do this Every champion in any endeavor Okay started with a vision Before they had a damn bit of skill They were lucky many of them to find really good coaches Right who showed up in the right place at the right time to me.
That’s also God talking to you. That’s That’s the universe conspiring to help you out They also worked hard they worked they outworked everybody right Working hard in this business might not get you really good results you have to also use your brain and work smartly so What I tried to do when I was younger Realizing I had about 13 K in today’s dollars. I Just always said, you know I wrote it out in the positive like I’m a great trading success and at the beginning admittedly they were vague And then I would add, you know, like, you know, I’m grateful now that I’ve achieved 10 million in net worth That my drawdowns are below 10% this that are the other thing and a lot of the stuff came true Not necessarily overnight, but when you act intentionally and you marry it with your goal and then you take the steps In my humble opinion You need to have the vision for yourself of what it is that you want to become in and around through and for your trading Right, you have to see yourself as six as a success.
Even if you don’t know how you’re gonna be a success You have to envision yourself at the end result. I think Stephen Covey says something along the lines of Begin with the end in mind or something like that. And if it’s not him, it’s somebody else right but you get the point So this way you’re you’re your mind is always in preparation mode.
We talked about that yesterday Preparation is how winners win. They see themselves being great successes. They see themselves You know making the winning pass making the winning shot You know, you can see yourself Following your model Entering protective stops keeping your losses knowing when to size up by the way tomorrow we’re gonna talk about I’m gonna take out the iPad again tomorrow and Do the next iteration of that lesson? That I did last Friday, I don’t know if it was a lesson but it you know, I talked about how how if you think Asymmetric payoffs it can take away or lessen the need for accuracy I’m gonna do a second part to that tomorrow So, you know, please like and subscribe you’ll get all the updates you’ll see when it’s posted So just like I never gave negativity a voice and it never came became like a complainer.
I Always envisioned myself being a great success Then as I was meditating or closing my eyes because meditation can mean a lot of things to a lot of people I would sit there and just be grateful for all that abundance because I knew it was coming I didn’t know when and I didn’t know how most people were like, I don’t know how to do that I can’t do I can’t set that as a goal if that was the case. Nothing would be achieved, right? President Kennedy said in Whatever. It was 61 63.
I think it was May of 61 That you know by the end of the decade we’re gonna put a man on the moon They had no way knowing how they were gonna do it, right? They had to get through Gemini Before they could get to Apollo So there was a lot of trial and error and it cost a lot of money But they started with the goal they started with the attention and then they built towards it So I believe you can do that Even if you’re really feeling like you’re struggling as long as you could eventually see yourself as a success That future vision of yourself is gonna pull you towards it. It’s cosmic I can’t explain how it happens a lot of it has to do with energy That’s why you have to stay out of the negativity you can’t complain you can’t bellyache and bitch everything that we do is in a paradigm of personal responsibility and if you Can admit that and adopt that as your as a mantra or as an ethos at least I? Think there’s great things for you in your future because I didn’t know my ass from a hole in the ground when starting these types of things and I had no idea because most everybody in the office that I was in they were financial advisors and they were You know saying the party line stuff that is kind of banal and stupid They don’t they don’t even know what they’re saying, right? Forgive them Lord. They don’t know what they’re saying Like, you know, you can’t time the market you have to buy and hold yet in the end when you look at their behavior They’re all walking around to each other’s desks.
Oh, and hey, what do you like here? It’s amazing So complete, you know Contradiction, so I just thought that you know, God had a different path for me I wasn’t gonna make it as a financial advisor because I didn’t want to be in consultative sales Which is largely what that business is they fancy themselves as portfolio managers? That’s not what they do. They’re not trained for it. They don’t have CFA’s and they understand asset allocation ie Diversification which admittedly is risk reduction.
It is not risk management by any stretch of the imagination And that’s really what traders are they’re risk managers so you don’t have to sit in absolute stillness and Meditate in what you might think is in a quintessential way how to meditate But I think there is great benefit to quieting your mind and to focusing your energy on the things that are working because that is What you can build on if you bitch and bellyache and complain Well that leads to further negativity and it keeps you in negative energy No one wants to be around you and certainly no one wants to hear you bellyache. There’s nothing sexy about it There’s nothing I could do to try to help you and the last thing I would ever do is enable you I would cut you Off perhaps perhaps in what you might consider a curt manner. I just don’t want to hear it I can’t I can’t help you if you don’t have a vision for success You know, if you have the vision for success, then then there’s great opportunity.
There’s great potential But if all you see is the negativity and things I would just let you sit with that until like a nice name said Well, how’d you say it? she said uh, and Then the day came when the pain it took to remain tight in the ball was greater than the pain it took to flourish so you got to decide like what kind of you know, what kind of adult you want to be and Think about the people that you looked up to in sports or or In theater right or in acting or anything like that the greats Found ways to overcome their shortcomings and they found they found ways to persevere Right, they found ways to persevere when they were broke and they had no money And when they really didn’t have anyone believing in them, they had to do it and believe in themselves That’s belief in myself is probably the single most important thing of Why you might be here watching me today or that I have any type of success? Yes, I built off of it and I branched out I did other things with my money, you know besides trading But it was the belief that I could do it in the first place was really what? kind of pulled me into my future self if you will now as As you do it more and more try to do it for 30 seconds to a minute thought comes up you got to let it go No, the thought comes in your mind. Let it kind of can’t go and come into your breath oftentimes meditation teachers yoga teachers or some of the monks that I would study with at like You know the lake shrine Where Paramahansa Yogananda had spent some time itself realization fellowship in the Pacific Palisades Every Thursday night, there’d be a long meditation three-hour meditation That’ll change your life. You come out of three hours of meditation and you’re out of this world and They would do like 15 minutes of chanting or curtain and then 45 minutes of stillness Now you have to have balance in life Okay to try to sit still for 45 minutes lose track of time lose track of everything and to do like I said In in the book chapter 2 is surrender Right surrender Then you come back and do Some light chanting and kirtan and then there’d be another 45 minutes and then they would repeat that So it’s technically not three hours, but you’re sitting for 345 minutes say sessions completely still what I used to do When thoughts would come into my mind, I would just say okay inhale and exhale in energy out with the bad energy In with the good out with the bad and that would kind of lull me like a lullaby into this kind of stillness where five minutes would go by or 40 minutes would go by and I wouldn’t know the damn difference and I’d kind of jolt myself like shit.
Was I sleeping? No, I wasn’t sleeping. I was awake, but Then you have mala beads you can bring those if you need something tactile The point being is that when you quiet your mind it can help you release what you think is negative, right? Because it’s really you that’s putting the label on it. You think losing is bad.
I don’t know that it’s bad Obviously you’re in the game to make money, but you can’t make money without taking risk and there’s a correlation You know between risk and reward That’s why we try to think asymmetry From the get-go so that even if the markets turn and or you don’t exactly know your strategic plan You put yourself in a great spot, you know to eventually win because the odds get skewed in your favor But I don’t know anyone who has ever said I feel like a failure because I learned how to meditate It was a complete waste of time. Like those are words that have never been spoken Now some of you need the action and you’re in constant motion. You have a lot of kinetic energy So it might not be a great fit for you I’m not here to try to convert you What I do know though is that for people who try it they do it little at a time try 30 seconds at a clip Not with your headphones on listening to Kodak black or whatever you do, and I’m talking stillness quiet.
No music You know certainly nothing, you know You could put that kind of spa music on in the background if you need that to kind of drowned out the ambient noise That might be in your neighborhood or this and that but the best thing to do is kind of sit. I Remember reading Eric’s book called. I think it was called moving into stillness He would teach a class on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 15th and Montana and I was always there He was actually I interviewed him for my book and he talked about when he was learning how to meditate He couldn’t find a quiet spot.
So what he actually did was he built his own meditation chamber and what he did was He found a way to move Stuff out of the closet, which is interesting, right? Because the clothes kind of act as a sound muffler And so you can sit there with a small light and I used to put on um the the the the noise canceling headphones Light a candle and sit in the darkness of that closet then no noise would get in and I could just drop out And my mind’s very very active And what you find is that if you can learn to meditate and quiet your mind It actually has compounding effects for your brain and it gives you the upside of of Napping, but without having to take the nap now, there’s nothing wrong with taking a good nap I’ve done it a million times myself, especially since I get up at like four or five o’clock local time Because I got to be on you know, new york and chicago hours so there’ll be a time, you know between one and Maybe three or so four o’clock pacific time where i’ll need a quick little 30 minute power nap But the meditation can refresh you like a good cup of coffee and so it might be something to do because you can start it by Like using these types of positive affirmations like what’s two three things that i’ve learned today Could you just one? That really going to help impact i’m very excited about this new thing that I learned And stay in that positive energy and then if you can stay in that energy quiet your mind And give yourself a bit of a mental break There’s too much evidence out there on how powerful this this is and I don’t talk about it enough because I don’t want to get All granola bar on you But you should definitely look into finding a way to quiet your mind without listening to your headphones and your your you know Your whatever these things are called earbuds anymore. Like you don’t need You don’t need to have constant stimulation Waning yourself off of that can actually make you maybe a more acutely aware of the things that you need to be aware of when you’re trading so anyway Please like and subscribe get your free copy of the uh, audiobook version of my book at trader mindset.com And come back tomorrow. I’m going to do another lesson on the risk management stuff.
Thanks for being here. I’ll see you tomorrow
