19. Leeks don’t have lives, or even sex lives…

In 2013 I gave a lecture at Garage Cafe, and in the last five minutes of the lecture I gave some pertinent advice to all of the listeners:

Remember, you need to have a life, and life is most important!

Today, five years later, open a search engine, search for “blockchain sex life”, click a link on the first page, and read for a while… Those articles, they are in fact not joking, because these things actually happen.

Do you still remember the most important method for a novice to grow into a “non-leek”?

Reduce trading frequency.

This method looks incredibly simple, but few people are able to do it. Why?

Because we are people, and our innate genes determine that we like to pay attention to changes. In our lives it is the same, as we pay attention to things that move, and not to things that are static. This is why the vast majority of people like to raise pets, and there are comparatively many fewer people who like to raise plants…

It is very normal for novices who enter the trading markets to immediately be attracted by the %K lines and other types of related numbers and targets that jump around. Chinese people who trade in the A shares market are relatively blessed — the market opens so late every day, then breaks for lunch after two hours, and then closes very early in the afternoon… So even if you want to stare at the numbers, it’s just for that amount of time, and there are fifteen or so hours left in the day where there’s really nothing to look at. So you’ve never heard that traders on the A shares market don’t have a sex life. They have nothing else to do, so why not?

The blockchain world is different. Trading in the blockchain markets is 24x365, with no breaks. Even if the system of one exchange crashes, there are more than 10,000 other trading markets still operating. A share investors basically trades on one or at most two trading markets; but blockchain traders, they are always working with the interfaces of five or six exchanges, and many leeks wish they could attach five or six big screens to one computer!

What is it really that has stripped leeks of their lives, and even their sex lives? Is it really blockchain? Even though it looks so much like the chief culprit is blockchain, when we calm down we know that blockchain has been unjustly blamed! Then what is it really? It’s this:

Fear of Missing Out, abbreviated to FOMO, and sometimes called Fear of Missing Opportunity

FOMO, Fear of Missing Out. FOMO is almost the thing with the strongest base in the masses, and the lower you get the easier it is to be controlled by it. You’ll understand if you look at the slogans of pyramid sales or WeChat businesses, as they are basically follow the same pattern:

You already missed out on XXX, and then you missed out on YYY, now do you want to also miss out on ZZZ?!

The less opportunities a person has the easier it is for them to be stirred up by these sentence patterns. If you calm down and think about it you’ll understand. If you’re someone who doesn’t lack opportunity, if the price of bitcoin goes sky high, would it worry you? It wouldn’t! Because you have other opportunities.

During Spring Festival 2018, a group of people made a “3AM” chat group. They never slept, they were still chatting at 3AM, and when other people were almost ready to wake, they had just started chatting. The topics were all over the place, from history to philosophy, from mathematics to engineering, and everyone and their brother were spitting out economic terms that people didn’t understand but sounded good (most of them were superficial or even incorrect)… Were they really “excited”? Looking at them from another perspective, they were nothing more than another batch of “FOMO victims”. There is a batch of these people in every cycle. I’ve already been through several big and small bull/bear cycles, so I’ve seen this type of situation and this type of people so many times. What they say is actually all repeating what the previous batch of people who have already left had said before. There is no difference at all, but they act as if they’ve discovered a new world.

However, what is awkward is that they have already entered the market. What is more awkward is that they have already deeply felt the FOMO… So what to do?

Work harder and more earnestly on your life!

There is a lot of substance in life. Back then I depended on this method to adjust my own behavior. I took a pen and paper and listed what I thought were the most important parts of my life. For instance, after sifting through things, I felt that friends were an important part. Then, in order to maintain and strengthen strong bonds with my friends, what did I need to do? I made another list of several pages, and after sifting through it I discovered that “eating good food together” was one very important thing. So when I have time to kill, I drive all over the place looking for good restaurants… After trying many out I’ll find one that is really outstanding, and if it has several branches I’ll go to them all and pick out the best branch — for example, the Daxiong Lamb Restaurant in Ganjiakou is to me the best out of its four branches.

If you like to read, just buy more books and focus on finishing them; if you like to play the piano, then find more songs and practice them; if you like to watch movies, then buy more home theatre equipment, and search for more cinematic resources… You must learn to entertain yourself, and be good at entertaining yourself. This is the most important skill that badass traders must have — it’s even 100 times more important than trading judgement. For me, even writing books and articles has become one of my main methods for “self-entertainment”.

If you’re not good at entertaining yourself, and if you don’t spend a lot of your time earnestly living, then there is no way for you to reduce your trading frequency, and you will become like a leek and spend all day staring at the screen, even putting your phone in a place you can reach it while you’re making love to your girlfriend… If you really do this, then just wait for yourself to slowly turn into an old leek with even less possibility of a sex life.