The best thing about trading is being entirely responsible for your own success/failure. It’s also the worst thing. Life’s weird like that...

If you’re going to succeed at anything, especially a risky activity, one day you’re going to be faced with a daunting truth.

It’s all on you. 

This applies to trading, starting your own business, a new managerial role. All of it.

With great responsibility, comes the potential for great success or glorious failure.

The weight of that responsibility can be both crushing and invigorating.

Unfortunately it’s usually invigorating when things are going well, and paralysingly terrifying when they aren’t.

Personal Responsibility

A couple of weeks back, our old mate* Chamath went viral:

(*not our mate at all, we think he’s a c***)

ICYMI, Chamath has made some ‘interesting’ decisions over the past few years including bragging about manipulating the price of Solana & selling out of various SPACs that he heavily promoted before they went on to record heavy losses.

But this isn’t really about him. Actually it might be easier to ignore the messenger entirely.

Put his ASTOUNDING lack of self awareness aside and focus on what was said.

It’s basically right.

See, we can spend all day arguing about morals, but I don’t really care for them.

I have mine. You have yours. Everyone else has theirs.

But morals are highly personal. And if we project them onto others they usually get in the way. Stop us from seeing the world as it truly is.

These days it’s far too easy to waste time critiquing others. Whether they deserve it or not is irrelevant. We have the tools constantly at our fingertips.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably touching those tools right now.

So, yes. Chamath completely abused the spirit of ‘the arena’, his comments received the exact response that the original speech warned against.

“Those cold & timid souls who neither know victory or defeat” 

Let’s be clear. I’m not defending him. Whatever arena Chamath thinks he’s in is one I’d rather not visit.

But the thread is also full of people who didn’t take personal responsibility for what happened to them.

The bagholders.

They say it’s all his fault. That they lost money because they followed & believed In (S)chamath.

The tough truth?

Nobody had a gun to their head. Nobody made them do it.

It was their choice.

Unless they take responsibility for their part in it, lessons won’t be learned, and mistakes will be repeated.

The world doesn’t care about anyone’s morals. It’s a competitive game. There are thousands of Chamaths out there.

You take risks, try and skew the odds in your favour, and do your best to learn and improve.

Don’t do business with obvious scumbags who don’t care about you is a lesson that has been learnt by many in the 2020’s so far.

But personal responsibility goes even further into everyday life…

The Cyclist

Dude’s asking the wrong question. Should be…

WHY did I get knocked off my bike?

Because I ignored the risks of a car indicating left, and tried to undertake said car, anticipating that it would turn later than it did.

Who’s at fault?

OBVIOUSLY the cyclist.

If you put yourself in a position of danger and then you get smashed, guess who’s at fault?

YOU!

No. I don’t care what the law says about cycle lanes.

Personal. Responsibility

It’s hard. We live in a media world that tries to trigger us at every turn. Wants to apportion blame to anyone and everyone that isn’t ‘ourselves’.

Elon has now fully replaced Trump as the polarising media target of choice.

Elon bad. Elon good. Whatever.

Whether that’s true or false we’ll probably never know for sure.

Fact is, if your tech was in this particular arena, would you want it to be used for more war? 

Would you take personal responsibility for your network being used to kill other humans? I know I wouldn’t.

This is a big part of our mission at Fink.Money

To encourage people to take responsibility. Improve their financial future. Learn how to manage risk & make high quality decisions.

And if they’re really lucky, we’ll start them off with five hundred quid in their pocket…