Everyone Needs Their Ego Fed

Don't let your ego get too close to your position,  so that
if your position gets shot down, your ego doesn't go with it. 
Colin Powell

The psychology of the market, as well as the psychology of the investor-speculator-trader, is of equal if not greater importance, than any market indicator.

According to a recent survey 97% of people feel they do not receive the praise, approval, and appreciation they deserve. Likewise 98% of people said they would perform better if they received more praise, approval, and appreciation. The government and business executives alike worry about low profits, inability to compete, and lack of initiative. You and I are concerned about how we get better cooperation from customers, employees, and family. How can we get other people to help us win our goals?

Your ego is your self. It is the most personal self-oriented part of your mind. Your ego is your underlying spiritual substance and regulates your mental state and self-esteem. It is by far the most sensitive part of your psychological and philosophical structure. A broken leg may heal in weeks; a damaged ego may never heal.

Just as the body needs food to sustain itself, ego food is mental nourishment that makes you feel better about yourself. Ego food takes the form of praise, encouragement, appreciation, and respect. It enlarges ones sense of self-worth makes them and you feel important. It also makes you and others feel useful and needed. Ego poison is the direct opposite of ego food. Ego poison consists of comments and actions that make you and others feel self-deprecated, unimportant, useless, "bad","stupid", and "small".

What happens when we feed ego food? Ego food, when sincerely dispensed, will help you win friends, win employee cooperation, gain love and support from people closest to you. In short, help you succeed. In the business of risk taking, there are so many times you will temporarily damage your own ego, and create self-doubt. It's not you; it is the nature of the beast. If you practice giving sincere ego food to others, they in-turn will feed your ego at the times it is most needed.

At work, at home, in community environments people perform second rate because they feel scorned, overlooked, belittled, taunted, or punished. The result, they defend their egos by acting the role of saboteurs. Think about that for awhile, then the next time the opportunity presents itself decide whether you will feed ego food or ego poison? And also think about which you would rather receive, from your spouse, co-workers, friends, and fellow risk-takers?

There are two ways to own the tallest building in town. One way is to tear all the others down!

Don't Blame Circumstances

Part of being a man is learning to take responsibility for your successes and for your failures. You can't go blaming others or being jealous. Seeing somebody else's success as your failure is a cancerous way to live. 
Kevin Bacon

We all from time to time face difficult problems, situations and circumstances. Whether it be in our personal lives, the business world and our jobs, or what to do in the marketplace. Our natural tendency is to blame the circumstances that surround us for the particular difficulty we are presently facing. Everything I know about the market said it was supposed to go up and it went down instead. How could I possibly have known this or that would happen?

One of the hardest lessons, to not only learn, but accept and understand; is that circumstances are not negative or positive, circumstances are neutral. It is our thinking, our perspective, that make circumstances either positive or negative. Try and think of these difficult circumstance in this vain, - "Everything in the universe has its opposite." There is a

North Pole and its opposite is the South Pole. If you live 150 miles from New York City, then it must be 150 miles from New York City to where you live. If something you considered bad happens in your life, there has to be something good about it.

If you suffered a loss on a trade or series of trades, you have probably gained a good deal of knowledge as to the why, and you have probably gained even more knowledge about controlling risk. The gains in knowledge, over time, will far out balance the loss or losing streak you have just suffered, by rewarding you in the future.

I hope it's clear, that every circumstance can be viewed in two ways. And it's the way we view the circumstance that determines its impact on our thinking and our mental state. No matter how bad the circumstance appears to be, taking another look, from another perspective, will reveal the potential good.

Napoleon Hill, author of the classic "Think and Grow Rich," wrote, "Every adversity, every failure and every heartache carries with it the seed of an equivalent or a greater benefit."