The reason mastery is rare is simple: most of us quit the moment progress becomes invisible, when improvement slows, and when praise stops arriving; but the ones who continue through the silent, unrewarded phase emerge with a skill level that cannot be challenged.
Check out Anders Ericsson work on the different levels of performance.
Anders Ericsson was the world’s leading researcher on expertise. His work demolished the “natural talent” myth and showed that world-class performance in almost every field (chess, music, sports, medicine, programming, etc.) is built through a very specific kind of practice he called deliberate practice.
I watched many years at the picture below, wondering what my final outcome would be? Losing decades of my life, only losing money or becoming wealthy?
I cannot calculate how many hours I did spend on day trading, but probably way beyond 20,000 hours. When I started, almost nobody knew what day trading was.
“Never give up on your dreams” is a very dangerous statement to me. Something is called a dream because it is something that people consider as difficult to reach. So dreams mostly stay dreams; only in exceptional cases they become reality.
There are several different outcomes possible:
You can lose decades of your life
You can lose your partner
You can go completely broke
You can kill yourself (I witnessed one case)
You can just get break even
You can become wealthy (just above average)
You can become very wealthy
“Never give up on your dreams” can lead to any of these possible outcomes. And statistically, the most profitable outcome has the lowest chances to be yours.
My experience is that the huge majority of people who dream of making millions in trading, are failing. The reason is simple: for most professions, you need an education. There are only a few exceptions. Becoming a trader is one of them. You need no education; just buy a PC, open an account (there are brokers who even have no minimum account size), and you are good to go.
