You might be thinking now – what qualities? And if you’re successful, aren’t you already a winner? Or if you’re a winner, aren’t you already successful? Well, you can be right, but at the same time it might not be exactly the truth.
The thing is that being a winner is a temporary thing while being successful means that you are capable of doing the winning thing over and over again. Not just once or twice. Buying powerball tickets online and winning constantly there might be a bit problematic (although not completely impossible, if you’re lucky), but when it comes to playing poker, or trading in financial markets it is actually possible.
But to really be successful in either of these things, you need to:
Be a good loser
If you’ve ever played poker, or traded in financial markets (be it stocks, forex, or anything else), you already know the feeling what a bad loss gives you. Often enough it makes you start doing stupid things. Things that you know are wrong, but you still do it because you don’t care anymore. And that’s when you start losing. The initial loss that caused all this behavior is nothing compared to what’s about to happen now. Stop. If you lose, in whichever way, whatever the amount, there are only two smart things you can do here – 1) take a break and/or 2) analyze what you did wrong, if you did something wrong at all. Sometimes it can just be bad luck. And it happens. And in order to become successful you need to overcome the failures, you just need to brush it off. The moment you start to get angry about the failures, whether you’re to blame or not, things start to go worse. So be a good loser, don’t take the losses too seriously.
Have discipline
Being a good loser is related to discipline. Discipline not to start doing the wrong things while you know it’s wrong. But there’s more to discipline – both fear and greed can influence your discipline. You might know what you should do, you might know what can happen next, but fear of doing the right thing, greed of not winning enough as fast as you’d want to, might make you want to do something you shouldn’t. You might know everything you need to know about poker or trading, but if you don’t stick to what you know, if you don’t have the discipline to do it, you’ll be losing in no time.
Know what you are doing
Obviously, in order to win, unless you’re playing a lottery, you need to have the skills as well.
Play with money you can afford to lose
This is again part of being disciplined enough. Every poker player, and every trader or investor would tell you that you should never use money that you couldn’t lose. If you do use that money, it hurts your discipline.
