Promethean Clay

My girlfriend of fifteen years has an unwavering confidence in my ability to do whatever I put my mind to. I think it borders on the delusional, but we can just call it a difference of opinion. However, one thing she does get at least partially right in the implication: I don't jump into anything by half-measures, and that extends to the resources that I draw on to better enable me to soak in the information I feel required. When I got into chess I bought a dozen books. When I got into the religious debates... Let's just say I have over a hundred books, shall we? Probably closer to two hundred if you count the Kindle books purchased. And so it is with trading. As I went over in an earlier post, my plan is to get my learning in before doing any trading. A key for me is to not jump the gun, but be patient enough to read the books and watch the videos to better leverage myself against the challenge of trading. I won't go through all my resources, only the ones I think impo...

I spent my Junior High days (grades 8 & 9) in a school in Halifax, Nova Scotia. One of the tracts we could take was Social Studies, which involved History, Geography, and Civics. For some reason I really enjoyed them and at the end of the year there was an award presented with the person with the highest scores in the three classes. I won it easily in my first year. In my second year I was far in the lead, but for some reason there was a final project I needed to do and just couldn't motivate myself to do it. The teacher supervising Social Studies went so far as to call my parents and I into school to talk about it. He explained that all I needed to do was pass something in and I'd lock in the award again, but for some reason I never did. When school awards were being announced, the Social Studies teacher announced in front of the assembly that there was a big surprise on who won the award, and proceeded to call out another students name. I was crushed. I should have expe...

I remember a day in college where I accompanied my dad on some errand that resulted in us going into the off-hours floor of a local accounting firm. I was interested in possibly getting into accounting and saw a room crowded with desks, saying to him that it seemed they were full of people and couldn't use another. He told me that's not what he saw at all. He said when he looked around he saw a room so in need of people that they could hardly fit the desks in. I saw a business filled up and not needing anybody else. My dad saw it as proof they did. This stuck with me all these years. Perspective. Something my dad would often say was "You can't kid a kidder". I guess that was his way of saying 'Stop fooling yourself because you're not fooling me'. Search within yourself and when you get into something, do it with purpose, not a whim. This I've carried with me all my life. I have a wide assortment of interests, but in all of them I am obsessive. It...