So I'm using profitly as my personal trading journal. If anyone finds these posts helpful, cool--reach out cuz I'd love to connect (and I need trading friends haha). If anyone has something to add, please do so! I trade-journal here because I can actually get feedback from other, like-minded, penny stock traders.

The Queen's Gambit, named after a chess opening, is a Netflix mini-series. (If you haven't seen it yet, don't worry, I don't think what I'm sharing will spoil anything.) The show is essentially about the personal life of Beth Harmon (a fictional character), who is a gifted chess player (see, nothing you wouldn't find IMDB-ing it).

If you're not careful, you can almost walk away from the show thinking, "wow, she's a chess savant...she's just got this innate gift...she was born that way" But really, and this is one of the things I like about the show, they show exactly how she got good.

She obsessed over learning the game.

She put all of her effort and cognitive power into this game. People talk about eat, drinking and sleeping something--she literally fell asleep visualizing the board, playing the game over in her head. Her chess friends would recommend chess books to her and she'd already read most of them. She made it her life.

She put in the time to learn. Like I mentioned, she read all the books. She played some of the best people she could find. She studied the chess games (super boring to do, I've looked at a few) of the greatest players in order to learn from them.

This is what I need to do as an aspiring trader: I need to obsess over learning the game.

Now, if anyone is reading this, I'm a husband and father of almost 3 (2 running around my house, 1 rolling around in my wife) so I get that there are other things to do in life besides trading. I also love people, so I have them over a lot and try to serve those in my life. But, before I started trading with big money (and lost a ton of it--see a previous post for that), I did not take learning seriously. I did not use my free time well. I did not obsess over learning how to trade. Sure, I watched a video here and there, plowed through some DVDs, then got lost inthe rest of life and thought "yeah yeah yeah, buy here, sell there blah blah I got it" and I'd gamble when the market opened.

But I'm learning through the fictional story of Beth Harmon and the real stories of people like Jack Kellogg (and the studies of Anders Ericson--check out his stuff), that I must put in the time. I have to be a bit obsessive. I have to use your free time to study, watch Tim's videos, study the trades of Mark Croock, Tim Lento and all these other people who are exceptional traders. I have to think, talk, dream, watch, listen to trading! I have to intentionally put in the time to study, to learn, to have my thinking shaped in the right ways.

I have to obsess over learning. It's a choice I must make every day.

So, kind of in light of "The Queen's Gambit" here's what I'm doing:

I'm making time each day to view video lessons/Tim's DVD content.

I'm reviewing those lessons and patterns in my head.

I'm visualizing charts and patterns.

I reviewing others' trades (Jackaroo's right now--ticker, dates, buy/sell). I want to study their "games" to understand how to trade better.

I'm listening to all the content I can through earbuds (podcasts, leaving my screen on in my pocket while listening to DVDs on profitly, youtube).

I'm trying obsess over learning the game; not at the expense of my family, work and other responsibilities, but definitely at the expense of that extra hour of sleep, that game I'd rather play, that time I'd like to slack off with, or whatever else does not fit into what I must be doing.

Greatness isn't born, it's forged over thousands of hours of hard work.