Hey everyone. It’s Kirk here again from Option Alpha and I wanted to jump on… And this is going to be a long Facebook Live today because what I think I’m going to be sharing right now is actually… It’s a little bit scary to actually share some of this stuff and kind of tell you my thought process. And I do have a bunch of notes on here, so I’m going to show you I have so many notes that I’m going to go through, so if I don’t look directly at you, it’s because I’m reading from this stuff and I’m trying to figure out my thought processes and what I want to get across. But there’s a lot that I want to share on this and this is going to be the show for the daily podcast which is really where the seeds of this whole journey started. When I started the daily podcast almost 700 episodes ago now, one of the things that I wanted to do is I wanted to offer a little bit more than just options trading. I wanted to kind of let you guys behind-the-scenes a little bit, talk a little bit about psychology and mentality and emotional stability. And so, that was one of the things on the daily podcast that we wanted to do and actually, in Show 12 when we talked about confidence versus arrogance, is when this whole thing started to come up. And so, to me, it’s only fitting that this conversation kind of dovetails and now starts to pivot from that podcast and stays basically on the daily call podcast. Even though I’m doing this live in Facebook Live, it’s going to be part of the daily call podcast. It will definitely be the longest daily call podcast I’ve ever done because most of them are usually anywhere between three or four minutes and so, who knows how long this one’s going to be.
The point of doing today’s kind of discussion here is really, it’s a turning point for me because one, my daughter started kindergarten today and it was a tough morning and still is pretty tough. I mean, her birth back in 2013 was very much a catalyst for where I am now and who the person I am now is. And when my wife and I got pregnant for Molly, our first daughter, we knew we wanted kids, but she was a total surprise. We did not expect to have kids. We were on a five-year plan and then three years into the five-year plan, we had found out that we were pregnant. But she was very much a catalyst that propelled me to this point. I mean, when I knew she was coming, I had to make a lot of decisions about who I wanted to be and what kind of man I wanted to be, what kind of father I wanted to be and ultimately, that led me down the path of deciding if I wanted to really do something with Option Alpha. And so, if you go back even five or six years now, Option Alpha really wasn’t much before then. It was very the blog state that it was and I had to make this decision, this quantum leap of faith to do something much bigger with Option Alpha and to really push kind of the envelope on what we were doing. And so, now that she’s off to school, I feel like it’s the perfect catalyst for me and I feel very much the same emotional state like I was then that I feel like there’s something just really kind of pulling at me to do something a little bit different, kind of get outside of my comfort zone and to grow not only as a person, but also as a trader, as an investor, as a father. And so, now that she’s off to school, this is the new crossroads. Perfect time to be a catalyst for me because she’s doing her own thing. I feel like I can shift and do more of my own thing.
I’ll start off by saying this and again, none of this stuff is in perfect working order, so you have to bear with me on it. But one thing I’ve learned over the past couple of weeks is that we’re not our thoughts. We all have so many thoughts that go through our head and to me, sometimes I feel like there’s so much going through my mind at any one time. I know my wife will probably agree to this that I’m an emotional rollercoaster at some points. But we’re not our thoughts and so, what we ultimately are is what we actually do. And so, I don’t feel like doing this conversation right now today. This is not how I feel. I actually was going to do it yesterday and then I kind of pushed it off and I know I can’t push it off anymore. But I don’t think any more, you have to feel like it’s your day to do something especially in trading or investing, as being a parent, as a father, a brother, a sister, a mother, whoever you are. You just have to almost act like you want to do it. And I very much want to do this, but I’ve been nervous about actually getting on and having this conversation, kind of detailing my story a little bit more and talking about where things are going to go with me. And so, for me, I feel like I have to work independent of my thoughts. I feel like I can’t wait around for this magical mood to strike because today is definitely not the day where I feel super energized, nor is it the day where I feel like everything is working perfectly because Molly went off to school today, like a big piece of me was ripped out.
I’ve often heard that it’s been said and I think this is Brene Brown who said this, but I love this quote. He said, “Vulnerability is just the courage to show up regardless of the outcome.” And to me, that’s what I feel like this is. I feel like I have enough courage, enough conviction of where I’m going to be taking things and where things are going to be moving and shifting at Option Alpha. I have enough courage and conviction that I can feel vulnerable enough to show up and kind of share this story. I want to go back and kind of take you guys through the back story if you will on a lot of this. For a couple of years now, I feel like there’s been something kind of deep inside of me that’s been trying to break free, this idea that I just know something is there, it’s pulling on me, it’s tugging at me, I can’t quite put my finger on it, I don’t really understand what it is, but it’s this feeling of trying to grow and do more as a person and I’m just naturally this way. I love to learn, I love to do all the self-help stuff, but everything I was doing just kind of didn’t really fit of jive and so, as a result, it’s just been kind of a muddled period honestly really where things have been going well and I don’t understand why they’re not going totally well, why I’m not totally super, super happy with it and I’d hit one milestone or have one success a little bit and then all of a sudden, I feel like, “Man, I’m right back in the same place. I don’t feel like I’m really making progress.”
And so, what I ultimately ended up figuring out and this is over the course of the last couple of months, so literally the last three to four months, the pieces have really been kind of falling together and I’ve been doing a lot of digging, soul searching, trying to understand, asking questions like, “Where does my story come from?” And I don’t know who actually asked it, but I was on a podcast or something or talking to somebody and they said, “Why do you trade options?” And I could’ve said the very easy answer which is, “Well, I trade options because of X, Y and Z and I love it.” But I thought to myself like there’s got to be a deeper understanding. There’s got to be a deeper story here for why to me, options are so amazing, like why was it options trading that I ultimately ended up gravitating towards or why did options trading pick me versus anything else? And so, I want to kind of share a little bit of the back story. My deep stories is really rooted in lots of volatility. To take nothing away from my parents because they were amazing people, I couldn’t be the person I am now if it wasn’t for my parents getting me here, pushing me and doing all of the things that they did. They’re amazing people. The problem was, is that through our entire childhood and even through now, we went through volatility financially and it was not their fault. I mean, it was their fault to a certain degree that they were stuck in the place that they were stuck in, but they were both in the same industry, they had two incomes coming from the same place, no outside sources of income basically coming in and so, as a result, our childhood and my childhood was very much a volatility rollercoaster on finances. I remember times where it was really good and we would travel and we would have vacations and then I remember times as a kid where we didn’t have any of that stuff and it was like the total opposite where Christmases were not what Christmases I thought they would be. And so, for whatever reason, that struck me.
And so, fast-forward, I go through this whole childhood of understanding just now, I realize it now that my entire childhood was basically just a lot of volatility on that side. It would only make sense now that most of what I do now is focused on avoiding volatility and trying to figure out how do you harness volatility to some degree, how do you profit from volatility and somehow it just makes total sense when I do this. But then even fast-forward into my years in school and in college and then ultimately working for investment banks and for retail banks. I was REITs and M&A and I felt the same thing. I went and worked in New York for an investment bank and a lot of what was there was out of my control. It’s just totally out of my control. You either made money in investment banking because the year was really, really good or you lost money because the bank didn’t close any deals and it wasn’t anything that you did necessarily. It’s just the function of the market. And so, I was up there right before the market crashed. The deal were falling apart left and right, 2006, 2007, this is when deals were falling apart before things really fell apart, right? And I realized once again, holy crap, here I am, doing everything I can do possibly to get myself out of this viscious cycle of volatility and yet, I find myself in investment banking which is probably the most volatile job in the world. You basically go there and you could make a ton of money and have amazing bonuses and then the next year, you can’t, right? And so, I found myself there. And same thing happened generally with REITs and I won’t go down that story, but the same thing generally happened. It’s just you get into a series of decisions and I just found myself continuously going back to the same idea that like, “How do I remove the volatility from my life? How do I get onto an even state that I can feel comfortable with?” And so, as a result, when I married Emily which was obviously the best decision that I made, I realized that she was such a strong person at her core, that she wasn’t overly-emotional and she wasn’t highly volatile which was good for me. I needed a person like that which is probably why I’m so attracted to her. But she was so great because she allowed me to kind of grow and start doing other things, like start actually trading at home and supporting what I was doing and start investing in real estate and start investing in other things and start building this business and all the long, trying to basically create a life that has as little volatility financially and stability wise as possible, right?
Now, fast forward to now, there’s still something that was kind of missing from this whole picture for me. And so, what I finally figured out and this just literally happened in the last two to three weeks even at that. What I finally figured out about why even still to this point, fast forwarding 10 years from all that stuff and building Option Alpha and doing what we’ve done as a family and as a couple and as a community hopefully and as a leader in this community, there was still something kind of like… I mean, why can’t I get over this hurdle internally of really putting myself out there and really kind of leading this charge or moving in the direction I ultimately want to move? And I found out there was three saboteurs as Gary John Bishop would call them and I love the book because it totally changed my life and he basically said, “Look. There’s three things that you say to yourself that self-sabotage your belief about everything. And there are these core fundamental principles that you’ve always believed. You just didn’t really know how to put your finger on them.” And now, I’ve had a really good realization and understanding of what these belief, these thought processes are. And so, my three beliefs about people or the three saboteur beliefs that you have is first, about yourself. You have this self-sabotaging belief about yourself. It’s the thing that you subconsciously say to yourself over and over again and you don’t actually directly say it, it’s just in your actions. But what it ends up doing is it ends up dragging you back to that comfort zone, that home base, that good feeling of like – If I ever get a little bit too far out in left field and ever do something a little bit crazy, then ultimately, it brings you back in, okay? The first sabotaging belief is about yourself. And so, for me, my self-sabotaging belief is that I’m not good enough. And so, this has been prevalent in my entire life. I’ve always had this self-sabotaging belief that I’m not good enough for anything that I do and this is why I overcompensate. It’s why I’m a self-proclaimed perfectionist, right? I want to do things perfect. I want to get something out and have it so perfect that there’s no gray area on if it’s good or not. And if I don’t put myself in situations where I can excel to be good enough, I don’t feel like I’m actually being challenged.
But what’s weird about this is that as a result of this, I find myself and I subconsciously put myself in situations that allow me to express enough of a movement to prove to myself that I’m good enough. I grow just enough to prove that I’m good enough and then I somehow seem to either stay still or not grow. And so, this is actually one of my attempts of actually doing that and then kind of overcoming that. That was my self-sabotaging belief and I still have that. That’s something I’m always going to grapple with, is I’m not good enough. And to me, it stems from a lot of things. I was a good student in school, but I wasn’t good enough. I didn’t have enough grades coming out of high school to get into the universities that I wanted to and I ultimately ended up playing football, thought I would actually do a better job in playing football, never grew, but just wasn’t good enough and I didn’t actually ended up playing, so to me, it was like, “Okay. Well, there we go.” I got here and made it to college football which is successful enough, but I didn’t actually make it to the next step. And then I wanted to do banking and I wanted to do all these other things. And so, I got just enough to say yes, I was successful doing it, but just not good enough for myself and so, I continuously have this thought process of bumps up top of my head of like – I’m not good enough to do it, but I recognize that now which is so freeing and so cool because I feel like I can overcome that now because I’ve pinpointed it. I called it out. I basically put a name and a label on it.
And so, the next self-sabotaging belief is this idea about people. You have this idea and this is so cool. You have this idea about how you interact with people and because of your idea of people, it then starts to create this idea of how you interact with people. My self-sabotaging belief about people and my misconception is that people don’t care or really, that they only care about hurting, criticizing, cutting other people down, comparing themselves to others and that’s how I’ve been conditioned to respond to things. And so, I don’t know if it’s necessarily one individual or a series of individuals, but I’ve always had this idea that people don’t care. They don’t really care and so, I try to over care sometimes, I try to prove that I’m both good enough, wanting to get back to my personal belief. Like prove that I’m good enough and prove that I care enough that I try to do things and overcompensate to some degree to go the extra distance to try and make them care, but then they ultimately don’t. And so, the truth is that I think people care, they just don’t think or I don’t think that they need enough of a push to grow. How do I say this? I think that people do care. I just think they need a bigger push on my end to really make a change. I don’t think I’ve been pushing many people in the areas that I feel confident pushing people. I wouldn’t push people in areas where I don’t feel confident. I’m not a brain surgeon, so I wouldn’t tell anybody how to be a brain surgeon, right? But areas that I feel confident, I feel like people do care about that. They just for some reason, nothing is really shooking them enough to make a change. And so, as a result, they default back into very familiar territory which they might be used to which is criticizing others, cutting other people down, comparing themselves to others, telling everyone why it’s wrong or why it doesn’t work for them.
And this is also dovetailed into just like my business life. When I was building Option Alpha, I did everything by myself until two and a half years ago. I mean, it was just everything by myself. And not only was this a bad idea because just one person couldn’t do it or think by myself, but as a result of my belief that people don’t care, I didn’t think that anybody could do as good of a job as me and so, I took on all the work and because I needed to prove also to myself that I was good enough, I then took on all the work even more. I basically got into this day where I was burning out on trying to do everything and trying to do it perfect. One, because I didn’t think people cared. Two, because I thought I wasn’t good enough, so I had to prove to everyone that I was good enough. And what a stupid idea that was because now, having one amazing team around me, so wicked smart, coming up with ideas and thinking of things that I never would’ve thought of or put together before myself, I realized how selfish and low and that’s so stupid of me to think like that because now, I see how much I’ve been missing and that’s totally changed my perspective on it, right? Not only am I more free to do what I’m really good at and what I should be doing, but other people are way better at doing stuff than I ever was. And so, going through this merger even the last year and a half and building a team and developing relationships with the people who are in my circle of influence has been an amazing learning experience for me because it’s broken down this belief that people don’t care. I think they do care. You just got to find out what they care about and they’re so passionate about it, it’s crazy. That was my other realization.
Now, my last realization was this self-sabotaging belief about life. And so, life is interesting because you have this belief about life that many people… Again, it’s very vague and gray, it hasn’t been really called out, but you just walk around with this weight on your shoulders and for me and for other people, it could be this. It could be that life is tough here, like they’ve had unfair circumstances, they’ve been in unfair situations, so they feel like life isn’t fair. For me, it’s not that. For me, it’s this concept that life is overwhelming and it’s really kind of rooted in like… I went through… Most of my life was very, again, volatile with finances and family, but then we didn’t have a real stable outside of my immediate family, core of other family, secondary family and then grew up in an area that was very pushing on academics and going to the right schools and whatever, so it was just an overwhelming weight. And then you get to a great school and then you have to have this huge weight of like – Well, you’re at this good school, so you have to stress and worry about what you’re going to do with this education because it got you here, so now, you got to go to Wall Street and you got to work for a bank and you got to be successful doing that and it’s just like oh, this weight that just weighs on you all the time. My self-sabotaging belief about life is that life is overwhelming and my compensating factor for that is – Well, if it’s overwhelming, then I have to be good enough to overcome it and because people don’t care, I’ve got to be extra good at everything I do because I got to overcome it, yada, yada, yada. It ends up being this, this vicious cycle of just these belief patterns that you get into. And so, again, this is not anything that I can necessarily change at this point. It’s probably something that I’m going to have to continuously grapple with and deal with. It’s very core rudimented in my subconscious, but just calling it out and just recognizing what it is, is so, so empowering.
Why do I do this? Why am I even just sharing all this stuff? I think it’s kind of weird. But the thing that I’ve realized is that we yearned to be addicted to the familiar. And so, if we get into a situation where we’re willing to trade what we want for what we know, safety always wins. And so, to me, right now, before everything that I’ve just done even now on this Facebook Live, I’ve played a lot of safe bets and that’s because that’s very familiar to me. That’s my comfort zone. I do things very conservative in all walks of life, right? I might take a little bit of risk here and there and I definitely have points where I’ve done this, but to some degree, the pain of doing what I’m not familiar with is really too much and I end up settling back into a safe zone and if we’re willing to trade in what we want for what we know, then the safety always wins. And so, what I’m trying to do right now is make a public declaration to say I’m not willing to do that anymore and I’m not willing to necessarily play it super safe and to put myself out there a little bit more because I think it can help that much and I think I can help maybe change the way that people live right now. And this whole conversation to me comes back to options, this idea that even the last couple of months talking with our team and kind of digging into this, this idea that our motto used to be that you should make smarter, more profitable trades and I think that’s true, but it’s deeper than that. I think what Option Alpha was started for and what it should be in the future is this idea that your life should have options, that you shouldn’t be constrained to doing one thing, this idea that if you are able to trade and you are able to make a go with this, that $100 could change your life. I mean, I’ve had people literally email me and say, “Kirk. $100 extra could change my life.” And that’s pretty crazy. And so, I think that the new mission of Option Alpha, this whole thing that we’re going to be going towards is just this idea that your life should have options and I think it’s kind of catchy that options ends up being the keyword there. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that you actually should trade options. It just means your life should have options. You should have diversified streams of income. You shouldn’t feel tied down to your job. You shouldn’t feel like you’re the only person in the room doing what you’re doing. You should feel like this is your community where you can come in and ask questions and not be criticized about it.
I think over the last couple of years, I’ve played it too safe in fear of being too judged or not being good enough and that’s on me. I get that. That’s a very prevalent thing that’s been right in front of my face for the last couple of years. As we’ve grown, as we’ve started to get more notoriety and more publicity and we’ve started to reach more milestones, I’ve just continued to compress deep inside for fear of being judged or being not good enough because that’s how I am and that’s led me to go 90% of my convictions. I take what I think I’m going to do and I go 90% of the way there. It’s like everything I’ve done and all the trading I do, I do it all, but I’m just holding back just a little bit of my convictions, maybe even a little bit of overall position size or other strategies I want to do or other things that I want to tweak and I know it’s because people are watching and following. Now, thankfully that’s worked well. Last year, we were up money. This year, we’re up money so far. We were up money last year when the market tanked. That was cool. That was great because it worked well. But the problem is that that reinforced this belief that I should stay in my comfort zone. Do you know what I mean? This idea that when you actually do something you know you should be doing a little bit differently and then something good happens and you’re like, “Oh, but I should stay right where I’m comfortable.” And so, it’s tough for me because I know I should be doing stuff different, but I have all these thoughts like, “Man. It was totally comfortable last year because we didn’t lose money net last year and we did well and the markets were very volatile and so, everything we’re doing was great.” But then there’s this other part of me that’s like, “There’s this other 10% that we should be doing.” And I’m not talking position size or portfolio size or strategies or whatever. It’s this is extra 10% that I feel like has been trapped inside and I have to let lose. Does this mean I’m going to do crazy day trading and leverage up 100% of my portfolio and do all these wild things? Absolutely not. Does it mean that I’m going to start pressing my convictions because I’m confident in how it’s going to work out long-term and I have enough courage to go through the vulnerability that’s required for the next five or 10 years? Then yes. I think I have enough emotional fortitude to see this thing through and I think that’s hard for a lot of people and I know that’s hard for a lot of people because it’s really hard for me. To me, my promise to myself and to you guys, is I’m going to be ignorant of the sequencing from now on. I feel like I’ve been good 90% of the way in being ignorant to it. I talk about it a lot like, “You don’t have to worry about what happens with this particular trade or that particular trade.” But I haven’t been 100% on it and I’m 100% because in my mind, I’ve always been 100%. I just haven’t spoken like I’ve been 100% confident in it. And so, now, it’s this idea that I’m 100% in and pushing my bets on what I’m doing in trading and how it’s going to work out because I know in the long-term, it’ll be okay. In fact, it’ll be great. And I’m going to be ignorant of sequencing and I’m going to be so, so, so focused on the process and just the repetitive mechanics that you have to do that I think to be successful.
I feel like right now, I feel like this has been knowledge and where I am as success level and then I set a goal up here and this is my new goal and then I start working towards that goal and then I just plateau when I hit that goal because now, this is the new comfort, right? And there’s got to be this catalyst to break out into that new trajectory. And so, this originally was like… And there has been various things over time, but generally, this was my daughter being born or really, basically finding out we were pregnant with my daughter. This was the catalyst that first led me to here and then recently in the last two years, I had another catalyst where we did a lot of research on option strategies, do the profit matrix, etcetera, totally changed the perspective on how we were trading, so now, it was like, “Well, crap. This is a new goal and this is a new catalyst.” And then my trading and just how I’ve developed has elevated and kind of risen to the occasion. And so, now, I’m at another level where I feel like man, I have to set the bar now higher. I have to reset my expectations, so that I start moving up basically and I’ve just been moving kind of like sideways mentally in a lot of this stuff and that’s really hard. That’s hard for me to do. That’s how I kind of think about it. And ultimately, when you think about your self-sabotaging beliefs, I think they honestly kick in right here and I feel like right now, I’m at another crossroads. I’m at a junction point where things are going to take off in a different direction and there’s just how to be a catalyst to doing it. Like this video, my daughter going to school, all the things that we’re doing on the backend with Option Alpha with the merger and the auto-trading and the new tech that’s coming, that’s all the catalyst for me, but I think these critical junctions where the beliefs and the “You’re not good enough. People don’t care.” all that stuff, that’s where I think it really kind of becomes really, really loud noise. And so, I think to some degree, you have to get over that stuff and I know it’s been hard for me to do personally, so that’s why I’m doing these videos because I think you can get over it. But oh, where do we even go with this?
The next thing I want to talk about and I know I got a lot that I’m talking about on this. I don’t even know how long this is, but hopefully you guys are enjoying it or at least getting something out of it. The next thing is vulnerability. I talked on vulnerability as this courage to actually show up, but the reality is it’s not about just emotional spilling. It’s about just giving boundaries and expectations on where things are going to go. Here are how I think about the boundaries moving forward and these are really the values that I’ve shared before on Option Alpha, but these are really kind of my values generally and this happened to be how the team as a collective put together some of these values, but things like pure motives. Pure motive to me is a very big one. We should be doing this with a pure intention, to help and to get to a certain point that we help enough people and if we help them, they help us. I’m very much a believer in karma comes all the way back around, so everything that we do is pure motive and that’s never changed for me, but now, it’s going to be totally in your face all the time and this I think actually means that I’m going to be more pressing on people to be totally honest. I think in many cases, I’ve thought to myself like, “They’ll come to me and people will come when they’re ready.” But I do think that at some point, I have to be stern enough and firm enough to say, “Look. I think what we’re doing here is amazing and could change your life and change how you live and how you trade and how you invest and how you interact with your family. I think it could be the catalyst that does everything.” And therefore, I’m going to push people to making a change honestly and not in a bad way hopefully, but I’m going to push people to making the decision, like, “Do you want to do this or not?”
Second value for me is help first. I think this is evident in everything we do anyway with Option Alpha, this idea that we have to give away a bunch of content and training and stuff to show that we’re helping first and build up the piggybank of value and trust and then and only then can we ask for you guys to help us in kind of building out this community. Third thing is take ownership. That’s a big one. I feel like a lot of people don’t take ownership in what they’re doing. This is that public representation of me taking ownership in where things are right now. I’m choosing to make a declaration to move, but I think you should take ownership in your trading and your life. It’s all responsible and all that weight is on your shoulders because it’s not on anybody else. As much as you want to blame it on everybody else, even myself, I love to blame it on the experiences I’ve had or why I did this or where I did that or what the weather was when I was there, none of that stuff matters. Take ownership. The next one is seek simplicity. This is really I think a cool avenue that Option Alpha is going towards right now especially with the new tracks and training that I’ve been working on, is this idea that things should be first, very simplistic. And once we get to the place where we can really have an incredibly simplistic model, then we can start to add complexly on top of that and to me, this has always been a big one for me because I love the idea of something being simple first and in my mind, I think about trading as a very simplistic process. There’s a lot of nuances, but it’s actually pretty simplistic.
The next is emotional intelligence. I don’t think a lot of people have this. I’m still building it myself and I’m going to continue to build it and this is going to be a very public display of me continuing to improve my emotional intelligence. I think I’ve got 90% of the way there. I don’t think I’ll ever be 100%, but helping people understand their emotional intelligence around trading is something I love to do. It’s like even today, I’ve got a bunch of people who shot me emails and they’re like, “Hey. What should we do about this position?” And my response was, “Do nothing. Don’t do anything. The best trade right now is just patience, just to wait it out and be confident in the process and trust what you’re doing versus being overly-emotional in either direction.” The last one is growth mindset. This one’s kind of tricky because you can have a growth mindset, but there’s always this stigma of you can’t grow to a level that would be kind of not social norm or why would you even do that. I think actually, subconsciously, this is why people self-sabotage themselves with trading because if they were successful trading, then what they’d end up having to do is they would end up having to actually tell people that they’re successful trading and people would look at them weird, like, “Really? You trade options? Isn’t that stupid? Isn’t that dumb? Isn’t it whatever?” whatever the stigma is about it. And so, even though they want to break out, they want to have really, really great growth and accounts and they want to be successful and get rid of their job or whatever the case is, they have this mindset that they can’t grow beyond just their normal circumstances. This is why actually, we see a lot of people where they get trading and they understand the concepts and then they fall right back into the same old, same old and that’s crazy. To me, this idea that we should fall backwards in trading and to the familiar and the usual techniques and strategies, I want to help people overcome that.
The intention of doing all of this as I kind of wrap this up… And I know this has been long, so if it’s helpful, let me know. Thanks, Andre. I appreciate it. The intention in doing this and how I think about this in my mind, as crazy as this, but I’m just going to tell you guys honestly how I think about this. When I think about what I’m going to be doing over the next five to 10 years, I think visually in my mind about leading a mass movement of great investors and I’m talking about anything, people who are invested in finance, people who are invested in their family, in their community, their career. I think investors are a different breed of people and I want to lead a great movement of investors and I visually see it in my mind as walking hand-in-hand down the street with other people who are leading this movement. I don’t see it as myself. I see it as a movement walking down the street together hand-in-hand, people in their own discipline, whoever that is and basically absorbing the blow of criticism and judgment and feedback on the front end, so this idea of having a really soft front, but a strong back. I know exactly what I stand for and I have no problem now absorbing all the blow on the front and if you want to follow me until you feel like you’re strong enough to then stand with us in the front line and start telling people about options trading or about what you’re doing or how you’re becoming a better person or a better wife, husband, spouse, whenever, that’s what I want to do. I want to lead that movement of people who feel like they need somebody else who can take the heat first. Now, I’m your guy, so I will help you do that. I want to be that person who absorbs the blow, all the feedback, all the criticism, takes the heat, so that you can kind of follow behind until you feel comfortable doing it by yourself. Does that make sense?
It’s funny because I think our genetic makeup is truly shaped to favor this interdependence between people, this idea that we want others to rely on us. That’s why I do this because not only does it make me a better trader, but because it gives me a lot self-gratification to know that I can help people, to know that if I help somebody just tweak a little bit of what they’re doing that they maybe won’t lose as much money or maybe make money or change how they think about the entire world and investing. And so, I’m always looking for this authentic connection between people and this is what I’ll definitely be looking for moving forward in the Option Alpha community, this idea that I expect now that people are courageous enough and vulnerable enough to show up and start trading and to start figuring it out and to look for Option Alpha to be the safe space where you can help each other and where I can help you or where there’s no stupid questions, where we can objectively look at one another and help each other out and not just totally come in and demean and criticize and downplay everything. We’re all in this together. This is a mass movement. We’re changing the way that people invest for sure and I think that we can all do this together. I’m trying to help people take control and build options in their life. And so, literally if you’re a person that’s not in with this right now, if you don’t buy into this, you are not my person any longer and I truly say that anymore. If you’re a person who’s totally not into that, you don’t buy that, that’s cool. You’re not my person and you can go someplace else. But if you’re into that and if you think that that’s a good idea, then hop on. You’re my people. I will protect you. I’ll go to war for you. I’ll be your person that takes the heat and helps you out because that’s the type of community that we continue to foster here. And it’s cool because we’ve actually done a lot of this by default, but now, I want to shut the gates on people who are not buying this anymore, who are not buying into this idea and this methodology. And so, if that’s the case, then you can move on and if not, if you like that, then sit back because you’re going to see a lot of this stuff coming down the line.
I’ll wrap up with this. A thing that I think I learned very quickly is that to be successful, you can’t be yourself anymore and I think that’s hard. I think we’re very much accustomed and used to being ourselves in many disciplines. We’re this person, this type of person. We even label ourselves as such. But if you want to be successful, you have to interact with the world completely different than you did before. It only makes sense that if you do exactly what you’re doing right now, you’re not going to get a different result. It has to be enough of a catalyst to interact with the world completely differently than you did before. The reality is you can’t believe in yourself to some degree to start. You have to just make a quantum leap of faith at some point to say, “Look. I have to be a totally different person. I have no idea exactly what that person is going to look like, but if I believe in myself and if I listen to my gut right now, I’m just going to come back into the same comfort zone that I was in before because that’s what’s safe to me.” You’ll probably look back and you think to yourself – Maybe the best times in your life are when you were not confident, scared, worried about judgment, but you ultimately ended up prevailing and right now, I feel like that’s not only a time for me, like I’m scared, I’m worried, I’m not confident, but my daughter going to school is a total change in our life. She’s a kindergartener now and she’s going all day to school. I’ve never had her away from me for more than a couple of hours usually unless I’m traveling or something. She’s never been away from us, so I’m worried that she’s going to be judged and I’m worried about what she’s going to see and hear and how she’s going to react all by herself, but I’m confident enough to let her go because I know the type of person she is and I have to do that to myself too where I’m worried about making this change in how I’m trading and how I’m interacting with the community because I know some of this stuff is going to rub people the wrong way and I’m worried about that and I’m worried about the judgment that’s going to come with that, but ultimately, I know it’s the right thing to do and I know that this is what I need to do. Right now, I think that’s where I am at.
Hopefully this helped out. If you guys did enjoy this, let me know. This was a very long Facebook Live, a very long podcast, but hopefully this helped out and I think you guys are going to be seeing more of this and I think you’ll see a much different shift in how I do things. I don’t think it’ll be totally obvious. I’m not going to be day trading or Forex trading or whatever, but even today, we started a new kind of strategy and trading and so, if you’re part of the community and part of the pro or elite membership, you saw this today, but it’s going to be a quantum shift in how we kind of approach things moving forward and I think many of you guys will like it. If you do, let me know, but until then, I hope you guys have a great day, a great weekend. Happy trading and remember, your life should have options. Take care.