How to Master Time Management

Dear son, No situation is permanent.

“Action is the foundational key to all success.” — Winston Churchill

Michael Jordan was once asked about his best skill, shooting, dunking, passing, defense or anticipating movements on the court? Jordan answered: “My best skill was that I was coachable. I was a sponge and aggressive to learn.”

Opportunity alone is never enough. When the right door opens, your preparation determines what you are able to do with it. The skills you develop, the knowledge you gain, and the work you do beforehand create readiness. You cannot always predict when opportunity will arrive, but you can make sure it finds you prepared.

How to Master Time Management

21 short pieces of advice from 20+ years of trading 👇 1. Protect your capital first. You cannot compound money you no longer have. 2. Master one system before searching for another one. 3. Trade less when the market is weak. A great setup does not exist in isolation. 4. Stop trying to avoid losses. Learn to keep them small. 5. Your best trades should make multiples of what your average losing trade costs you. 6. Study your winners as deeply as your losers. You need to understand what you did right. 7. Judge the quality of your decision separately from the outcome. A good trade can lose money. A bad trade can make money. 8. Become extremely selective. "Tradable" and "worth trading" are two completely different standards. 9. Focus on genuine market leaders. Average stocks rarely produce exceptional results. 10. Look at what happened before the setup. The prior move and price action matter as much as the breakout itself. 11. Never chase a stock because you are afraid of missing it. There will always be another trade. 12. Decide your entry, position size and risk before you buy. 13. Let the market determine your exposure. You don't need the same level of aggression in every environment. 14. Learn to sit in cash without feeling that something is wrong. No position can be the correct position. 15. Don't confuse activity with progress. More trades can simply mean more opportunities to make mistakes. 16. Give your strongest winners enough time and room to become meaningful winners. 17. Keep your watchlist small enough that you actually know the stocks on it. 18. Review your trades regularly. Your own trading history can teach you more about your weaknesses than another trading book. 19. Stop judging yourself by a few trades. Think in samples of dozens or hundreds of decisions. 20. Build confidence from evidence, not from your recent P&L. Know why you trust your rules. 21. Never stop improving your process. I still review, test and question my own trading after more than 20 years. The biggest change experience made to my trading wasn't adding more. It was learning what I could remove.

People typically feel bad about their mistakes because they think in a shortsighted way about the bad outcome and not about the evolutionary process of which mistakes are an integral part. I once had a ski instructor who had also given lessons to Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player of all time. Jordan, he told me, reveled in his mistakes, seeing each of them as an opportunity to improve. He understood that mistakes are like those little puzzles that, when you solve them, give you a gem. Every mistake that you make and learn from will save you from thousands of similar mistakes in the future. #principleoftheday