I have an important question to ask you. This is a question that’s best answered from your gut, not your head. Take a deep breath, put logic aside, and let yourself react to this question:
Do you wish you could make money easily?
Or for the golfers out there, do you wish that you could always play your best?
Many of you, if you allow yourself to be totally honest, will say yes. You’re not crazy for feeling that way. Intellectually, everyone knows better. You know you shouldn’t expect to make money every day or always shoot low scores. You know skill is earned, not downloaded. And yet, tucked somewhere deep inside the recesses of your mind, a part of you that believes the rules don’t apply to you.
The wish whispers to you and seduces you into believing there’s a version of success granted to you that doesn’t require diligence, discipline, and experience.
Maybe, just this once, you could get the result you want without having to trade or play the right way.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could recover your losses in one big trade or one big session.
It’s so easy to make money or play great today, why can’t this happen all the time?
Wishes like these are one of the most under-recognized and destabilizing forces in performance psychology. They undermine consistency and spark intense emotionality when colliding with reality.
Wishes, hopes, and fantasies are evidence of a detachment from reality—slight enough you can easily miss it, but significant enough to cause damage under the bright lights of the performance arena.
That’s why answering that question honestly is so important. You need to know if part of your mind, essentially, doesn’t believe in gravity, leading you to:
- Make rash, impulsive decisions, without concern for the downside
- Avoid journaling, reviewing, analyzing your performance in detail
- Easily justify ignoring a strategy that’s tried and true
- Become less concerned with preparing yourself properly
- Assume your goals will easily be reached
- Double down in the face of losing or bad play
- Overreact to both good and bad luck
That last part is quite dangerous, especially in trading and poker, where getting rewarded for bad behavior temporarily validates the fantasy—it’s evidence that your wish might be true.
This is precisely how casinos, and social media, profit from this flaw in our nature. Intermittent reinforcement – rewards that are random enough to imply that you have the edge, when the other side has it.
This is especially true when your chips are down.
“F$@# it. Let’s go for it,” you say.
On the surface this looks like you’re giving up. In actuality, you’re giving in to the hope that you can quickly escape.
Win and you’ll end up right back in this spot again because you’ve taught yourself that when things get difficult, abandoning your process can save you. Lose, and confidence crashes to deeper depths—the hopes and wishes that you’ve pinned your success to have been dashed, cratering what was already fragile.
Fortunately, these hopes and wishes aren’t irrational, they’re just a small part of you clinging to the past.
Adult Santa Claus
Hopes, wishes, or fantasies aren’t inherently bad, nor should they be extinguished entirely.
I consider them a part of our nature that’s actually quite beautiful: An instinct to believe in and create something greater than our present reality, which sparks our imagination and fuels genuine innovation.
The byproduct has been transformative and appears like magic. The technology that allows instant global communication would have looked like magic to anyone born a century ago. That kind of magic unfolds over generations, not a great week of trading, winning a poker tournament, or great practice session at the range.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” ~ Arthur C. Clarke
This part of our nature is most easily seen in children, where believing in mythical figures like Santa Claus is developmentally correct—a chance for kids to play with this aspect of our nature, eventually converting wonder into creation.
When that part of ourselves doesn’t mature, it allows us to believe that success can appear easily without the years of unglamorous work behind it.
The goal isn’t to kill the capacity to wish, it’s an upgrade that drives us to build real skill, gain valuable experience, and develop a reliable edge. A process that follows The Inchworm Concept.
The starting point for an upgrade is simple: Find the moments when the wish appears. Verbalize it, or say it to yourself.
Is the wish about making money without developing skill? About skill arriving instantly, without the repetitions it actually requires? About the market simply cooperating with your strategy more often than it reasonably should?
Naming the wish you’re carrying makes it possible to counter it in the moment it shows up — during pre-round warmup, in the impulse to jump into a trade early, the desire to gamble your way out of a string of losses by abandoning process.
Then keep showing up to do the work anyway.
For obvious reasons the wish won’t get upgraded instantly. (You can’t wish for an instant upgrade to wishing.) Instead, over time you steadily start to sober up. You begin seeing things as they are, not as you want them to be. That doesn’t always bring with it a good feeling.
Your strategy might look weaker. You might realize you’re not as disciplined as you thought. You might have to acknowledge that you’ve been hiding losses or violating your strategy. You might realize that the path forward is going to take longer than you hoped.
Honesty is the tool for your upgrade. And with it you’ll learn how to use your imagination to build something real.
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