Execution- Your key to Success

 

 Every year, you see so many new businesses starting. The founder of each business is sure he/she has a great idea. How many of these businesses make it to the next level? How many of them reach the heights they wanted to when they started the business? Perhaps, less than 5%. Why?

The answer is simple - They failed in executing their plan. You may have a great plan or idea but unless you know how to execute it, success will be hard to find.

“Ideas are yesterday, execution is today and excellence will see you into tomorrow.” Julian Hall

More often than not, people fail not because they lack knowledge or have a bad idea but because they don't give due attention to the execution. Execution is the main driver that always pushes you towards your goal. Before we go further in the article, I hope you are with me that execution is the key to success. If not, try to analyze yourself, why are people not successful even when the idea is great?

“Ideation without execution is a delusion.” Robin Sharma

In any journey, the prime factor which will lead you to success is - your DRIVING FORCE of doing something. Why do you want to execute your plan/idea? You want to be a successful trader - but why? Unless you have a strong desire to achieve your goal, you will see after some time your interest level will drop in what you are doing, or if you fail in the initial phase, you will give up. But if you have a strong desire, you will make sure you are well prepared to execute your plans and you will do anything to achieve it. When I was in school, I only wanted to study those subjects which I liked, however, as you know to get a good ranking in the class, you have to get good marks in all the subjects. So I worked hard in all the subjects. Why? What was my driving force? I wanted to have a high profile professional career after school.

“Average people have great ideas. Legends have great execution.” Anonymous

If you are with me so far, you know your desire to excel in something is important. What's next?

Let us say, you have a strong desire for success. Will that guarantee success? Certainly not. If you are a laborer and your job is loading and unloading bricks, you may find success just with a strong desire to excel. Here we are talking about achieving things which requires skills. Not everyone is a born trader or a businessman, those who are successful today, it is only because they have acquired the right knowledge and skills and then worked hard in achieving their goals – through execution.

Idea, strong desire and required skills - you have all of this. Now what? 

Will you reach your goal? You can start tasting success with the above three, but to reach your ultimate goal - you need something more - Continuous improvement through monitoring of your progress. The road to success is long, you need to have checkpoints at regular intervals to see you are on the right path. You can achieve it by monitoring Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). If you are a trader, by just looking at live trade's MTM or reading Profit & Loss statements won't improve your performance. There is no hard and fast rule in trading, different traders can have different styles of trading and earning goals. You have to be clear about your style and earning goals. You should not be changing it very frequently.

As a trader, you can have KPIs as below:

• Number of trades per week or month
• Number of gainers Vs losers
• The average profit in winning trades
• The average loss in losing trades

Just like any business cannot survive if it is not growing, you as a trader cannot excel unless you grow. How can you grow? You can do so by attending seminars, training programs and reading books. If you want to know more about the growing part, I will write a separate article on it.

Just like you monitor the progress of the company every quarter from the numbers on its balance sheet, you should have numbers of your performance covering every aspect – number of trades, success ratio, number of trades lost because of emotional factors, top trades of the quarter (maximum profit), etc. Once you have these numbers in front of you, you don’t need an expert to tell you where you are going wrong in execution. You will automatically know what changes you have to make in your execution strategy to improve.

Just ensure, you are improving quarter by quarter and in a few years (yes, success does not come overnight) you will become a master of trading. Having said that, it does not mean, all the efforts you have been making to be a successful trader will not be required. It will still be required, but now it will come naturally to you and perhaps your efforts will reduce. Success is not a destination but a journey.

I am confident this article will motivate you to take the first step and the right execution will help you to get what you deserve.

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Prem Sinha is a lifelong passionate learner and enthusiast of the Share market since 2003. He also guides other traders in their trading journey since 2010 through quality training programs. Through live trading clubs, he mentors traders to reduce losses, improve their capability and reduce their learning curve.

His major areas of expertise are Price action based Technical analysis, Options strategies based on Option Greeks, customized Option strategies, Option trades management and Option portfolio management. He & his team have also explored and adopted some scientific techniques to handle the psychological aspects of trading.

Connect with him on

TradingGyan, LinkedIn , Meet-Up, FaceBook

 

Fear of Failure- A big hurdle for Success

 

“Don’t worry about failures, worry about the chances you miss when you don’t even try.” —Jack Canfield

 Failure is good, fear of failure is not good at all. When you start on a journey of accomplishing something, the chances of success, as well as failure, is 50%. However, if you fear the failure at the start of the journey, the chances of success come down. This is applicable in every field, be it studies, starting a new business, or in trading.

If you are starting something new and you fear the failure, it is better not to start it. The good approach will be, you take a pause, understand your fears, work on overcoming them, and then start. If you are low in confidence and still have fear of failure, you tend to make more mistakes.

In this article, I am going to talk about the fear of failure and what you can do to overcome it.

What are the reasons for FEAR?

1. Lack of confidence - The worst decision you can make is to start something with low confidence. Why are we low in confidence? The answer is point 2.

2. Lack of understanding about that activity - There is only one reason why you are low in confidence - the lack of knowledge or information in whatever you are doing. This leads to the third point.

3. Less capability to manage the situation - If you don't have enough knowledge on whatever you are doing, you are not aware of challenges that can come ahead and you will always be fearful of the future.

4. Lack of experience - If you don't have enough experience in what you are doing, you will always be fearful.

Let us sum up the reasons of fear with an example - You heard from your friend about the 20% profit he made in the stock market in the last one month and you got fascinated by it and you want to start trading now with your savings. The idea was certainly exciting - 20% in a month and you straightaway jumped into it. You got tips from your friend on where to put money. Once you put your hard-earned money in the first trade – How confident will you be? Ask yourself before reading further. You will have low confidence because you are not sure of what you are doing nor do you have any experience – practical as well as theoretical. You will have a constant fear of losing the money.

Now consider a scenario, where you learned about trading by taking some course, you have studied all the possible scenarios which can occur when you trade and how experienced traders react to it. Will you fear failure? No. You may still fail but it will be not because of fear but because of situation or conditions which are beyond your control.

The moral of the story is – people look for shortcuts to success and there are none!!

“A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.” —Albert Einstein

What you can do to overcome failure?

As discussed above, fear is mainly because you are not sure of what you are getting into. How can it be overcome? Here is the step by step process for it:

1. Define the Goal in detail - Just don't jump on to anything, whatever you are doing, you will have to define your goal. Just defining the goal won't help, you will need a definite goal. In trading, you cannot define a goal as - 'I want to make a profit.' You will have to define the profit - 'I want to make a 10% profit in my trades.'

2. Get the information or knowledge required to achieve this goal - Once you know your goal, it will be a lot easy in knowing in which direction to head i.e what all information and knowledge to get to increase the chances of success.

3. Start with small steps to build the capability through live experience - Learning is an ongoing process so you should never think that you are done with learning and go all gun blazing. Take small steps, apply all your learning in a live environment, see how it is going, and analyze the results. This will ensure that even if you fail, there is no major impact done.

4. The above steps will increase the confidence and since you will be learning from your own experience in every step, the learning is going to be with you for rest of your life.

With time, you will see the mistakes or failure percentage going down.

Why failure is important?

As I mentioned at the start of the article, fear of failure is bad and not a failure. In trading, you will fail and before you get started, just accept the fact. Here are a few reasons how failure can be advantageous to you:

• When you fail, you know what not to do and if you have to do the same thing again, you will do it differently which will inculcate creativity in you.
• Since you are also evaluating your failure, you will come to know if there is a particular habit of yours because of which you are failing. You get to learn about yourself.
• Life is like a sine wave, sometimes up and sometimes down. Failures prepare you for the down journey. If you are well prepared, you will rise stronger in the next cycle.

Let’s end the discussion by talking about fear in trading. Do you know why most people don't get success in trading? It is not because of the market or bad luck, it is mainly because of their fear. When you lose money in trading, instead of analyzing what went wrong, you start worrying about the next trade - what if I lose again? How will I recover what I have lost? You cannot afford to get into that zone. So focus on learning and executing your learning and not on the result. If your learning and execution are good, results will come automatically.

Have a profitable trading journey.

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Prem Sinha is a lifelong passionate learner and enthusiast of the Share market since 2003. He also guides other traders in their trading journey since 2010 through quality training programs & live trading clubs and mentoring traders to reduce their learning curve. 

His major areas of expertise are Price action based Technical analysis, Options strategies based on Option Greeks, customized Option strategies, Option trades management and Option portfolio management. He & his team have also explored and adopted some scientific techniques to handle psychological aspects of trading.

Connect with him on

TradingGyan, LinkedIn , Meet-Up, FaceBook

Can we get what we deserve?

The size of our ambitions, should match the size of our efforts.

Do you feel you deserve more? Well, we all feel this, for at least few things in our life - money, love, recognition, success or maybe something else. Can you do anything about it? We all dream and dreaming is not at all bad but dreaming without any action is not the right thing to do. Why don’t you have what you dream of? In this article, I will tell you the key to success – the thing which you are missing in your journey of life to be successful.

Understanding the reason

If today you feel you deserve more and you don't have what you deserve then mostly it is because you are not prepared to have it. The first and important step is to acknowledge the real reason. I am sure in your mind you may have few reasons for not having what you want. – These reasons could be - 'The circumstances are against me’, ‘the society is against me’, ‘I am not lucky and so on.' All these reasons can delay your success but if you are persistent enough, factors like these cannot stop you from having what you deserve. Do you want to know the real reason? This may sound rude but the real reason is that you are not making enough effort to make yourself capable to get what you deserve. Let this sink in you before you read further.

A lot of people come and tell me, 'I always end up losing money in the stock market.' I always ask them, 'How much time you invested in understanding the stock market?'

Engineers spend 4 years in college learning different subjects, giving N number of exams to get a job which pays them Rs 40,000 a month. Along with 4 years of their life, they also pay the college fees. Now, when it comes to earning money through the stock market, most people want to make a profit by watching a few videos or taking a few random classes. How can you even expect to be successful in this case? Can you land up with a job in the IT field with a crash course of 2 months? No, you cannot.

What is the key to success?

Be it the stock market or any other professional field, the key to success is increasing your level of capability. Unless you are investing your time and energy in increasing your capability, you should not expect success. Once you have the capability, nothing can stop you. It is a universal law.

Don’t chase after success, chase after capability. If you are capable of anything, then success will be chasing you.

As per the dictionary, "deserve” means "having some specific quality to receive a reward". This quality is called "Capability". The magnitude of our success depends upon our level of capability. So the next question is how to build capability? It is an easy 3 step process and everyone who follows these steps can achieve it -

1.       Acquire right & specific knowledge - The first and the foremost step is to figure out what you want to learn. Most people are not even aware of what they want to do. Today you may decide to learn Machine Learning, tomorrow you want to be a teacher, and the next day you want to be a trader. This attitude won't help, it will not take you anywhere. You will end up being more confused. Think about it, what is your interest, what is that keeps you engaged? Also try to get the right knowledge from the ocean of materials available on web and books with help of experienced people. Once you are sure of it, move to the next step.

2. Execution - Learning in today's digital world is not the tough part. There are online courses available for everything, online teachers ready to teach you anything and everything. Most people learn new things and never execute it, and if you don't execute your learning, you will very soon forget everything that you have learned. The theory is just one part of learning, the real learning happens only through executing the theoretical concepts in live projects. You can learn all about candlesticks in trading but unless you apply it in the real world, it is as good as not learning it.          

Swimming can’t be learnt without entering into water.

3. Skill building- When you focus on execution, you acquire important and specific skill sets. These skill sets you cannot learn by reading books or watching videos. If you have your teacher or trainer with you in the execution stage, the skill-building process becomes much easier and faster. We can have many skills sets of average level but we must try to master some specific skills which we feel affinity with. Such specialization would constantly increase our worth and making us more deserving to achieve our dreams and goal.

Such practical learning is not a destination but a continuous journey.

I hope after reading this article, you will acknowledge that the only thing between what you have and what you deserve is your capability and nothing else.

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