New Year’s Resolution or Past Year’s Reviews

@Colibritrader

 

Hi traders,

I am usually posting mostly my thoughts and seldom sharing the ideas of others.

That does not mean that I am not appreciating other people’s thoughts, but just try to keep the content original.

This post will be slightly different. One of the most inspiring people online I admire is @TFerriss

Here is an excerpt of how he approaches New Year’s resolutions.

I believe that that is one of the right approaches. Have a read through it and let me know if you agree or disagree.

I have tested it and it does work for me.

This is the second year I will follow these steps. Sometimes the best trading advice comes from non-trading circles. Find @TFerriss own words below:

New Year’s Resolution

I’m often asked about how I approach New Year’s resolutions. The truth is that I no longer approach them at all, even though I did for decades.

Why the change?

I have found “past year reviews” (PYR) more informed, valuable, and actionable than half-blindly looking forward with broad resolutions. I did my first PYR after a mentor’s young daughter died of cancer on December 31st, roughly eight years ago, and I’ve done it every year since. It takes 30-60 minutes and looks like this:

  1. Grab a notepad and create two columns: POSITIVE and NEGATIVE.
  2. Go through your calendar from the last year, looking at every week.
  3. For each week, jot down on the pad any people or activities or commitments that triggered peak positive or negative emotions for that month. Put them in their respective columns.
  4. Once you’ve gone through the past year, look at your notepad list and ask, “What 20% of each column produced the most reliable or powerful peaks?”
  5. Based on the answers, take your “positive” leaders and schedule more of them in the new year. Get them on the calendar now! Book things with friends and prepay for activities/events/commitments that you know work. It’s not real until it’s in the calendar. That’s step one. Step two is to take your “negative” leaders, put “NOT-TO-DO LIST” at the top, and put them somewhere you can see them each morning for the first few weeks of 2019. These are the people and things you *know* make you miserable, so don’t put them on your calendar out of obligation, guilt, FOMO, or other nonsense.

That’s it! If you try it, let me know how it goes.

Happy New Year and Happy Trading,

Colibri Trader