This is written by Martial Artist Bruce Frantzis about internal development,but I think it can be applied to the process of becoming a successful trader:
Most of us have distinct growth spurts when we feel like good results are happening. We think: “Wow! I’m really getting it.” You’re inside and you feel as though you’re being opened up step by step. You have effectively arrived at a point where you’ve bulldozed enough to see a furrow as to where a road being laid down.
But, then, you find that you go through a very, very, very long period from when that furrow in the ground was visible until it’s actually black topped or cemented, and there’s a lot of work that occurs in between. The work is invisible; it’s not glamorous; it’s not glorious; and a lot of people say they get bored. Well, if you get bored it’s because you’re looking for the goal, you’re looking to have the road finished so you can beat your chest like Tarzan or sit with your knitting needle remarking, “Isn’t this a beautiful quilt?!” You want something for show. You see, the point from which that hole is visible in the ground to putting black top over it is a lot work.
When this moment in time arrives, you really have to love your game because you don’t know how long it’s going to last. It could happen that it takes very little time, but you just have no way of knowing. So it becomes very important that the act of delving deeper inside yourself and fixing and developing all the little things that don’t have the dramatic glory to them, but without which you never fill in that road, are given proper consideration and time.
The nature of going from a plateau to all of a sudden having a period of “Wow! Eureka! I got it!” is that you get excited because everything is happening. In the time that seemed to be boring you were building your internal infrastructure, upgrading your internal workings, fundamentally changing what was weak inside of you to becoming stronger. Essentially you were changing the way your chi was ambiguous to setting all the conditions so it could become clear. If you are meditating, eventually you could take the murkiness of your mind and go from that furrow in the ground and construct a paved road.
