Posted on Feb 9, 2012 in Featured, Forex Strategies | 12 comments
What It Takes to Become A Master
Ever heard of the name Anders Ericsson? Perhaps not, but i'm guessing you heard of the name Malcolm Gladwell, author of the bestselling books Blink and Outliers. Gladwell in his last book Outliers was trying to figure out what separates highly successful people from the rest in any field. In it, he discussed the 10k hour rule, which was actually from the research of Anders Ericsson at Florida State University.
Anders conducted a critical research project whereby he found it normally takes 10,000 hours of practice at a skill to become an expert in any discipline. During this time, your central nervous system will string together new circuits and connections that eventually give you the tools and abilities to execute your skill with mastery. Ironically, he also found it was done without a conscious consideration of the action – the athlete or performer was just doing.
What he discovered in his research was a Zen-like intense concentration, whereby the experts completely focused on the activity. It was in these moments that the experts in their field were achieving peak performance by entering a state called 'the flow', originally characterized by Csikszentmihalyi in the 1970′s.
10,000hrs to Become an Expert Trader?
I know, many of you are saying, '10,000 hours would take me years, perhaps a decade to get to that'. In response to that, I have a few questions;
-What if you could accelerate your learning curve and learn how to enter that state before 10,000 hours?
-What if you could enter that state every day while trading?
-What do you think this would do to your trading?
-Would you put in the effort to develop this?
We are going to talk about what you can do to leap-frog the 10,000hr process in this article and take years of your learning curve.
Before we talk about what you need to do to enter the state of flow and effortless concentration, we are going to discuss the four key features that characterize the state of flow. They are;
1) An intense and focused absorption that makes you lose all sense of time
2) Autotelicity – a sense that the activity you are engaging in is rewarding for its own sake
3) The 'Sweet Spot' – this is where the task at hand in relationship to your skills are perfectly matched
4) Automaticity – the ability to do something automatically
Let's get into each one and see how we can relate them to trading. Then we will talk about what you can do to shortcut this process and decrease the number of hours you need to be studying charts to become an expert in reading the charts.
#1 An Intense and Focused Absorption
One would almost think this would be enough to enter that flow, but all four are required to enter this zen-like state in trading. If you train in yoga and meditation consistently day in day out, then this will come a lot more naturally because you are already practicing the craft of focus and concentration. But if you are not, many things will come into play and affect your concentration.
