Damn, I can't sleep. I've already text messaged those at work, telling them I might not go. And I still can't sleep despite the increased "serenity" caused by not worrying about going to work. About which i feel guilty anyway.
I am worried about everything, pretty much. From pivot lines to death. Can't find the proper drug to relax.
Damn...
Damn.
I am not tired enough to sleep but I am too tired to go to work, especially after taking all these extra pills trying to go back to sleep.
I have a compulsive personality, workaholic type. I was done with all work. Finished creating the 20 extra systems, which are working fine. Everything is taken care of. And what do I do? I go and read someone else's post and get the idea of creating another system. No one forced me but my own drive to improve things and myself.
But this is not good. This is like overheating your computer and burning it out. It produces more harm than good.
And as usual, I got all this from my dad. He pushed me to work harder forever. Initially I rebelled and stopped going to classes, because it was just too much pressure and even if I did well, I never received any gratifications, so it didn't seem a useful thing to work hard (i got criticized anyway) and I stopped, so at least I didn't have to work on top of being criticized.
But then, as I grew up, even just a couple of years later, I inherited my dad's compulsiveness - of course through teaching and emulation, not because it's in the genes or anything.
And so I started with my list of compulsive achievements - doing anything but having fun. So I started with reading: reading one book every three days, after a year and 100 books, I decided it was enough and moved on to... watching movies. Which I am still doing. Sometimes watching up to 5 movies in one day. Especially in my early twenties, in college i was skipping classes, and watching 5 movies a day.
But before that, i got obsessed with learning English, and then French, and then Spanish... and then it wasn't enough and i wanted to learn German but there I stopped.
Then I got obsessed with trading, and everything here happened differently - with results not linked to efforts.
In reading, if you push yourself you read more, and you "achieve" - maybe you didn't enjoy the book, but you can say you read it in 3 days. Same with movies. You can make yourself watch movies. With languages you can make yourself learn new words, by getting up in the middle of the night and looking up something in the dictionary, which I did for many years.
But with trading, you cannot make yourself trade profitably. Actually the harder you push yourself the more you trade and the more you lose. It's one of those rare things, where effort can easily be misplaced. I can't think of any other things I am familiar with where, like in trading, your efforts do not pay off. This is not the case with automated trading, and I should have focused more on it from the start, completely on it. But with discretionary trading, you get ****ed over and over again, simply by your compulsive efforts to increase your capital.
Well, there's many facets to this, but you know what I mean - I explained all the details countless times.
Hell no, since I can't sleep let's get into it.
In automated trading, things are different, because you're not there having to exercise patience. So you just hack away and create new systems.
So the problem for a workaholic and compulsive person like me is when you have to exercise patient, where a job can only be done with a certain dose of patience.
Because you cannot have patience if you're a compulsive worker - you get used to getting things done. But trading - and similar endeavours - get done by being patient and accepting that things don't get done, because they're not within your control.
So that would be like fishing, where you have to wait for the fish to come to you. Which I have never done, but probably because I would fail at it.
It would be like women, where i fail, because I wait for immediate acceptance, and if they hesitate even one minute, then I say "better nothing than waiting and incertitude". And if I succeed and get the woman, i fail soon thereafter because i try to impose my schedule on her - phone calls she has to answer when I feel like talking to her and phone calls i don't answer when she needs to talk to me. Control freak, as I wrote on my profile.
Wherever things/people are not under my control, I try to control them. In trading, romantic relationships, fishing and other things, this causes you to fail. Yet I cannot avoid it, because my desire for control is uncontrollable. This, besides having a control freak father, might also have to do with being an only child. As an only child, I didn't have a brother getting me used to things being misplaced. Where I left my things, they stayed. No one changed my order of things. Other people might give up on control early on, because they realize they cannot achieve it. I didn't, because the settings were much more favorable. An orderly father, everything tidy... no brothers. So I chased the illusion of complete control and perfection. And I still try to achieve that, constantly.
But as I said, in some fields, the constant effort of controlling causes you to fail: in fishing you're going to chase away the fish. I'd probably be checking every minute if there's fish approaching. With women I usually act like "you don't want me? fine, just give me an answer immediately". That of course is even worse in Italy where women just never throw themselves at you, like they do in the US. And with trading, you don't just come home empty handed because you didn't catch any fish. Every time you miss you're losing money besides time. You can't say like i do "now I am going to make 400 dollars because i want it". I find myself thinking stuff like "I am going to make 300 dollars from this trade", even before i start it. Not only that. If things go the wrong way, I don't get out because I had decided that i had to make 400 dollars. Then, once I am down 400 dollars, I decide that I'll be happy with getting out at breakeven - no actually I can only accept to get out at a +1 dollar profit. So i can say i didn't lose. Sometimes in order to reach that 1 dollar profit i risk my whole account. Then, as soon as it happens, I get out. Of course once every ten times, with the martingale stuff I do, this makes me blow out my account.
Enough said. This was good writing but it turned into the usual whining.
