It’s been a long time since the last episode. This one exists because I needed it more than you did.

Last fall I was living 43 floors above Austin, taking $20,000, $30,000, even $43,000 days — a couple hundred thousand a month — and telling myself I was being careful. Then I shorted a stock, it hit my stop, and instead of closing it I added 10,000 shares. An hour and a half later a million dollars was gone. The strange part: it didn’t hurt as much as the $5,000 I lost on non-farm payrolls in 2006, because that $5,000 was everything I had.

This episode is a reading of, and an argument with, Meghan O’Gieblyn’s Harper’s essay “Backsliding: On the paradox of willpower.” The line that holds it together is Simone Weil’s: we have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will. Willpower is how you get the terrible fall. Attention is how you notice the state you’re actually in before you add size.

Trading is easy. You wait, you take it, you stop it if it’s not good, you let it run if it is. Those things are impossible in the wrong state of mind. The work is not another mantra about protecting the account. The work is quieting the voice, paying attention to one small thing — bird watching, serving someone, a word you repeat until you mean it — until, in the moment that matters, you don’t have to command yourself. You just obey.

I made this for me. I’m the worst example in it.

Essay: Backsliding, Meghan O’Gieblyn, Harper’s, July 2026 (https://harpers.org/archive/2026/07/backsliding-meghan-ogieblyn-willpower/)

Harper’s gives two free articles a month. I’ll also put the link at robbooker.com.

Also mentioned: Paul Tudor Jones on Invest Like the Best; Roger Lowenstein, When Genius Failed; Michael Singer, The Untethered Soul; Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace; Iris Murdoch; William James; Romans 7; Philippians 4:8.

It's been so long since I recorded one of these episodes that it makes me wonder, does

anybody still care about these episodes?

But the real question is, after I thought about it for a minute, do I still care about

these episodes?

And the answer is not until today.

For reasons that maybe I don't fully understand, and then on a more deeper, more honest level,

for reasons that I don't really want to talk about.

And with that introduction, I want to talk about Backsliding, an essay written by Meghan

O’Gieblyn in the July 2026 issue of Harper's Magazine.

The title once again is Backsliding on the Paradox of Willpower.

You can get a free, you get two free articles a month on Harper's, you can look it up and

Google it, or you can go to, oh, let's just say robbooker.com, and you can click on the

link to Backsliding, or the trading book podcast, or whatnot.

And I'll try to put a link to this essay in the show notes, wherever this fine podcast

is produced, and that you found it.

And I just want to say thank you for being here.

And with that introduction, let's get started.

All traders fail at some point.

Some failure as a trader is permanent.

But all traders fail on some level at some time.

Now you just meet some of those traders at their peak.

Those are the traders that you compare yourself against, and that you're jealous of.

But you also meet some of those traders at their rock bottom.

And in neither instance do you really understand who they are.

We take a snapshot of a trader in time, and we remember them for that.

We remember Michael Burry for the money that he made in the big short, but we don't remember

him for the failure to predict the value of gold or water or almonds or whatever it was

that he did shortly thereafter.

And then we think of the failures.

We think of some trader who gained notoriety by losing so much money.

John Meriwether is a good example of that.

He lost a ton of money, and his profile was one of the main profiles in the book When

Genius Failed by Roger Lowenstein.

But he had a whole career after that.

It absolutely didn't end his career at all.

It didn't end his money making.

And he did hit rock bottom.

And there are other examples of that.

Nassim Taleb's mentor.

And I don't remember his name right now.

I think it starts with a V. But anyway, he failed miserably after succeeding for many,

many years.

And then he was known for that failure.

Anyway, anyway, we meet traders all along the way.

But when we meet them first, we see them at some point in their trading journey.

And then we peg them there.

And we leave that in place.

Now, that's not necessarily bad, because who cares what you think or I think of someone

else?

What matters is that we do the same with ourselves.

We have a bunch of great wins, and then we peg ourselves as the best.

Or we have a terrible loss, and then we peg ourselves as the worst.

But how did we get there in the first place?

If all traders can fail, how do the traders that fail and pick themselves back up?

How do they do it?

And if all failure as a trader comes from not managing your money properly, which is true.

And that's such a cliche that it doesn't communicate the depth of its importance.

The only way to fail at trading is to run out of money.

Failure as a trader is running out of money.

And the only reason you run out of money is that you run out of the willpower to protect

your account.

And you might say, well, what about success?

Success is irrelevant if you can't do the first thing, as Warren Buffett said.

Now, in the essay Backsliding, Meghan O’Gieblyn, and I'm just going to call her Meghan, says,

and I quote, some people spend their whole lives fighting other people or institutions or fate.

Then there are those of us whose greatest battles are waged against ourselves.

You could argue that we are the lucky ones.

There's so much evil and suffering in the world, so much conniving and malicious intent.

And the self is at least, well, a familiar foe.

But ask anyone who has spent years in the grip of an obsession, a self-destructive habit,

irrational fears, chronic self-hatred, or a persistent lack of faith, whether they would

prefer some external adversary.

And most will assent without hesitation.

In other words, if you've struggled with the problem of letting your losses run and

then running out of money and causing your trading account catastrophic harm, you're

fighting against yourself.

I've done it.

I've lost that battle before.

That's why I'm producing this episode.

For instance, and I quote, I can think “fist” and my muscles obey and my hand becomes a

fist.

I can compose a sentence in my head and command my fingers to type it, and every word appears

on the screen just as it was in my mind.

End quote.

I, Rob Booker, I can say, I'm going to read an essay and make a podcast episode and the

words are coming out of my mouth and now they're going into your ears.

And I quote back in the essay, but there are other things that I cannot do no matter

how badly I want to, and no matter how hard I try.

In fact, there seems to be an unwritten law ensuring that the more energy I expend on

certain problems, the more likely I am to fail.

And it's precisely those problems that are the most important.

If you've ever struggled to be a successful trader, what you're saying is, I have some wins.

I feel good.

Then I have some losses that are bigger than those wins, and I can't seem to overcome myself,

even though I know I want to.

Now I quote from the essay again, on the wall above my desk, there's an index card printed

with a single sentence from the notebooks of Simone Weil, W-E-I-L.

And that quote is, we have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.

The author says, and I quote, I thought that if I stared at it for long enough, the wisdom

would enter my soul via osmosis.

One day I would look up and suddenly understand this hasn't happened yet.

End quote.

Have you ever felt like that with your trading?

Have you felt like it's a fault that you let your losses run, that you periodically have

catastrophic losses?

I listened to an episode of Invest with the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy, I just want

to say it that way, and Paul Tudor Jones, who says in his early career, in his 20s,

he would make $100,000 and lose it, make $100,000 and lose it, make $100,000 and lose it.

And it sounded so familiar to me that I thought, he went a decade like that?

And the answer is, yes, he did.

So if you think that you've had this problem for a long time, and it's evidence that you

should quit, then I have some words for you, F that thought.

It doesn't mean you should quit.

It means you should quit trying to do it the way that you've been doing it.

The author of this essay first came across the quote, and the quote was, we have to try

to cure our faults by attention, and not by will.

The author first came across the quote from Gravity and Grace, which I guess is a book,

18 months ago, in the midst of a very long and difficult winter.

When I think back on that time now, the image that immediately comes to mind is of the blue

and white tile on our kitchen floor.

Because it seemed like whenever I tried to do something in the kitchen, like make dinner

or pour a cup of coffee, I would end up sitting on the floor, staring at those blue and white

hexagons through a blur of tears.

Now I stop the quote, and I want to talk to you.

Do you ever feel like that?

That whenever you try to go into the trading space, and you're making some progress that

then you find yourself back on the floor looking at the tile?

The author continues, over the preceding year, I'd returned to the addiction that had nearly

killed me in my 20s, and from which I'd been free for more than a decade.

It was not what people in recovery communities charitably call a slip.

I drank for almost a year in secret.

I hid it from everyone, including my husband, and confessed only when I was caught.

I did not understand why I did this.

The 11 years of sobriety had been, by all objective measures, the happiest of my life."

And here's where we become more personal, and here's where I admit to a fault and a

mistake greater than yours.

I've done it before you, and I've overcome it.

I've never read an essay that described in such great detail how one overcomes it, and

that's why we're here today.

You've maybe heard this story already, but last fall was the happiest of my life.

The happiest, most successful trading I'd ever done.

The most beautiful, spacious, expensive, peaceful, even sacred space I'd ever lived in.

Forty-three floors above the city of Austin, Texas, close to my best friend, surrounded

by people who cared about me.

With an interesting life, a successful trading education business, and $20,000 days, $30,000

days, a $43,000 day, I was making $200,000, $300,000 a month as a trader.

And I was humble, meaning, I mean, no one's ever truly humble that says they are, but

I look back on that time, and I was constantly trying to keep myself in check, regularly

reminding myself that it could all go away in a heartbeat, often talking to my trading

partner and saying, we've got to make sure that we don't let this slip.

And then I did a podcast interview with Roz or Riz, or whatever his name was, and in the

podcast interview, we talked about my gargantuan amount of success and how cool it was, but

I kept telling him, no, no, no, no.

And I kept trying to bring it back to humility, but I could feel it in my bones that he was

hyping me up because he wanted to hype me up for his podcast audience, and I was taking

the bait.

If you've never heard that podcast, it's because, well, not long after that, I lost every dollar

that I'd made over the course of the last previous 12 months.

I lost a million dollars in one trade over a two-hour period of time.

The weird thing is that it didn't feel as bad as the time I lost $5,000 in 2006, trading

the non-farm payroll report in the currency market.

That $5,000 was all I had.

The million dollars at that point wasn't all I had.

It hurt.

It was the down payment on a house that we were going to get, the house we didn't get.

Anyway, let's go back to the author.

She says, the return to alcohol was part of a larger pattern of regression that had begun

years earlier in my late 30s.

Regression.

That's what we can call it, right?

When you backslide?

When you thought you'd started protecting your account and closing your losing trades

and then one day you have a loss so bad anyway?

That's how I felt on the million-dollar loss.

I felt like, wait a minute, how did this happen even though I was trying so hard?

I was willing it.

I was wanting it, right?

Well, maybe, maybe, but regression pretty much captures how I felt.

As a background in it, I simply didn't close a losing trade.

I shorted something.

I was making a lot of money.

I was having very small losses at the time.

I was consistently shorting.

People say shorting is dangerous and all trading is dangerous.

Please, please don't lecture me about one way or the other.

It's all dangerous.

Plenty of the most famous traders who ever blew up their account were buying stuff.

So I shorted a stock.

It hit my stop and I added 10,000 shares instead of closing it.

And then it was an hour and a half later and the million was gone.

So the author says the return to alcohol was part of a larger pattern earlier in her late

30s.

Now, as everybody does, this author says, I know a lot of things in theory and none

of it seems to be of much help in the trenches of everyday life.

So last year, the author writes, I made my way through Weil’s Notebooks, the private

spiritual writing she produced during the final years of her life.

She often returns to a problem she sometimes calls retrogression.

How can we persevere through that moment that inevitably arises in any moral pursuit when

our will begins to flag, our attention starts to wander, and we backslide into our old ways?

The reason this happens, she argues, is gravity.

Weil believed that the inner life was determined by metaphysical laws that were just as inviolable

as natural laws, and she was trying to work out in her notebooks a kind of spiritual physics.

She seemed to think that if she could understand these mechanisms, she could hack spiritual

growth.

So her concept of gravity draws on both East and West, on karma, on original sin.

It's a spiritual force that is constantly pulling us downward toward everything that

is earthly and base, which is why the moral life often feels like an uphill battle.

It feels like an uphill, constant battle to protect your account and stop out early.

It's like, it's not just like we don't love stopping out.

It's like we just can't keep wanting to protect our account.

I return to the quote.

Gravity seeks equilibrium.

This is why we crave vengeance.

When someone hurts us, we believe they should be hurt too.

It's why we believe that the moral debts we sustain, including the sacrifices we make,

the good deeds we perform, should be rewarded with just and equal compensations.

And it's why we're always returning to bad habits, which have their own gravitational

pull.

As the young child said in a beautiful, maybe the funniest, best YouTube video ever, look it up.

This nine-year-old steals a car from his grandmother, knocks over a mailbox, drives through a Costco

parking lot, hits some cars, and finally crashes into a tree.

And they ask him why he did it.

And he said, because doing bad stuff is fun.

I like doing hoodrat stuff with my friends.

Bad habits and bad things have their own gravitational pull.

I quote, spiritual progress requires fighting against the natural downward inclination of

our souls through fighting.

And fighting it is also the problem.

Finally, if we push beyond these natural limits,

willing ourselves to continue up the mountain through sheer determination,

after our motivation has expired, we pay the price with a terrible fall.

Once again, if we push beyond these natural limits,

willing ourselves to continue up the mountain through sheer determination,

after our motivation has expired, we pay the price with a terrible fall.

It's why it just takes one day that you're tired

and stop to think, and stop and think, and stop and breathe,

and then walk away.

It's because we don't stop to think about the state that we're in.

When the author happened upon the Weil quote about attention and will, she says,

I felt the thrill of recognition that I'd come to see as the signature of truth,

the sense that you're always learning for the first time something you've always known.

Remember, the quote is, we have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.

It's why it's always seems like so impossible to overcome these trading bad habits.

And we think we understand what that quote means, right?

So she writes it on an index card,

puts it on the wall above her desk and looks at it for many days,

and then realizes she didn't understand it at all.

Or she says, I grasped only the last part about the ineffectiveness of the will,

which was something I'd known for a long time, not through some mystical platonic knowledge,

but the way I've come to know most things in life, through repeated failure.

It's possible through sheer effort to summon cheerfulness, but not happiness,

piety, but not faith, seduction, but not love, productivity, but not genius.

I know from experience, the author says,

that it's impossible to will one's self out of an addiction.

Maybe not closing your losing trades doesn't sound like an addiction,

but it sounds like gambling to me.

And that sounds like an addiction.

So is attention the solution?

And if so, what must I pay attention to?

And that's the question.

When the author finally landed in treatment at the age of 28, she says,

she'd been living out of her car for several weeks, and had lost basically everything,

and refused the interventions of everyone who'd previously tried to help.

She says, and I say it again, when I finally landed in treatment at the age of 28,

I'd been living out of my car for several weeks.

Well, I don't know if that's really the way that it goes.

I think it goes more like this.

When I'd been living out of my car for several weeks, I finally landed in treatment.

I don't know why she mixed those two up,

but I think it's because we like to romanticize the way it went.

It's like she woke up in treatment and realized she'd been living in her car.

When in reality, she knew she was living in her car.

You know that you're living in your car in your trading account.

You know it.

Nietzsche, I don't know how to say his name,

Franz, says somewhere that the illusion of willpower rests on our tendency

to identify with the part of our soul that commands, not the part that obeys.

So we have this illusion that our willpower is awesome.

And it means that we identify with the part of our soul that commands.

Like, I am the commander of my own ship.

But what we really are is a being wired for obedience to the unseen.

If that doesn't resonate with you, let me say it again.

We are more wired not to command but to obey.

And we often think, as I did when I was making $20,000 a day,

that I was in command.

But what I was really doing, and I didn't realize because I didn't truly stop to think,

is that I was simply obeying.

I was in the river of success.

And I thought I was paddling.

But I was just in the river of success.

And if I had realized it at the time,

I would have realized it was much easier than I was making it out to be.

And I was the only one standing in my way.

The author says, the person who breaks her diet

wishes for two things at once, to eat and also to refrain.

I would add to that, the person who breaks their trading discipline

and loses a ton of money wishes for two things at once,

to trade successfully, make money, trade for a living,

but then also to just be a gambling maniac

because doing bad stuff is fun.

And trading is fun to do hoodrat stuff with your friends.

The thing is, there's two kinds of wants.

The wants we want now, and the wants that we really want most.

Let me say it again.

There's the wants, the things that we want now, and there are the things that we want most.

And we sometimes trade the things that we want most for the things that we want now.

And why does it happen?

That's the point of this entire episode.

And the answer kind of is because we're not paying attention.

The author says, remember, we have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.

It would be reasonable to assume that I am attracted to this quote

because attention seems like an easier path than will.

That's not remotely the case.

I don't know how to pay attention.

I'm not talking about the inability to finish a book or sit through a long academic lecture,

which only requires desire and some determination.

I mean that I consistently find whatever is happening in my mind

to be more urgent and absorbing than what is happening in the world.

I suffer a great deal from this inclination

because despite the fact that my thoughts appear more interesting and urgent,

they're circular, deterministic, and relentlessly self-excoriating.

In other words, we just keep talking to ourselves as if it's the only voice that matters,

and we can't seem to shut it off.

It's why I loved Michael Singer's book The Untethered Soul so much.

And it rocked me.

It scared me to read it like I was reading an ancient papyrus scroll

that had a spell on it.

Because what it was doing was it was violating everything I thought I knew.

And it taught me that that voice that's talking is separate

because otherwise how could I listen to it?

And if I could listen to it

and hear it say things that sometimes shocked me, surprised me, made me sad,

I realized I could also stop listening to it.

And that's what that book was about.

Anyway, this is the key.

This is the key to last summer when I was making $10,000 or $20,000 a day

and last fall when I lost a million dollars in a day.

And I quote from the essay.

In French, attention, the word for attention,

is built from the word waiting.

And Weil often speaks of attention as a form of patience.

It's the ability to seek the good and the beautiful

even when you hear nothing on the other end of the line but silence of the void.

It's a willingness to remain at the doorstep of truth without consolation or reward,

to ignore the voice that's constantly whispering in your ear

that there's something better around the corner.

All my attempts, I would say, at stopping these catastrophic losses

failed because I could not remain on the doorstep.

I became dazzled by the possibility of learning new things and forgot what I already knew.

And that's kind of true for us but not really as much as this.

We must be willing to remain at the doorstep of truth without consolation or reward.

We must be willing to quietly, silently, carefully, patiently

sit in silence as we get ready for the trading day

and notice if we are ready or not.

And that, my friend, if you know me and you know yourself,

is exactly what we don't do on most days.

A deep, spiritual, sacred time in your day

when you think about the truth of the state you're in.

And you can change that state you're in from a state of anxiety to patience

by the attention that you pay to it.

When you notice it, you go, hmm, I'm noticing it.

I'm addressing it.

I'm allowing myself to feel it.

And then you drop the floodgate.

The flood of anxiety or sadness or emotion comes through and it washes over you.

Otherwise, how is it going to leave?

Unless you let it out.

The Greeks believed that virtue was simply knowledge.

That if you know what is good, you'll automatically do it.

Those funny Greeks.

Here's a quote from the Greeks.

No one who knows or believes there's something else better

than what he is doing, something possible, will go on doing what he had been doing

when he could be doing what is better, Socrates says in Plato's Protagoras.

You know what?

That's the biggest bunch of malarkey I ever heard in my life.

That makes Socrates the crappy self-help author

of the 400 B.C. or whatever it was.

Listen, this idea, says the author, is totally alien to me.

I don't understand it at all.

I don't understand this idea that simply knowing what's better for you will cause you to do it.

That's idiotic and stupid and patently untrue.

What the author says that she understands is the bewilderment of the Apostle Paul

in his letter to the Romans.

Quote, I do not understand what I do.

For what I want to do, I do not do.

But what I hate, I do.

Wow.

Or a famous Indian spiritual author whose name I can't pronounce, in the book Mahabharata,

who says in the Pandava Gita, I know what is Dharma, but I'm not able to practice it.

I know what is not Dharma, but I am not able to keep away from it.

I understand the deranged ambivalence in St. Augustine's prayer,

grant me chastity and self-control, but please not yet.

William James called this the dilemma of the sick soul, which is divided against itself.

The problem is not knowledge, but will.

And the only way a divided will can become unified

is through a crisis of surrender,

a moment when the individual stops striving

and allows some larger force to transform her.

Give up the feeling of responsibility, William James writes,

in the Varieties of Religious Experience.

Let go your hold.

Resign the care of your destiny to higher powers.

Be genuinely indifferent as to what becomes of it all,

and you will find not only that you gain a perfect inward relief,

but often also in addition to particular goods you sincerely thought you were renouncing.

Listen, if you've ever looked at someone and said,

I wish I could trade like them, or I'm mad at them, or I hate them, you know, in a funny way,

because they're so good at it.

What you're not realizing is it has nothing to do with their usage of the charts.

They've just let go of what becomes of it all.

They're doing it for the sake of doing it.

If you really want to do well at this,

you've got to stop trying so damn hard.

The author says, I've always thought that grace is the opposite of will.

And I suppose that I'm attracted to Weil’s idea of attention,

partly because of its similarity to grace.

We live in an age that is positively obsessed with attention.

You can't even glance at a screen these days without encountering someone lamenting its decline.

But Weil is not talking about focus.

Attention for her is nearly the opposite.

What could be more stupid, she asks,

than to tighten up our muscles and set our jaws about virtue

or poetry or the solution of a problem?

Attention is something quite different.

I'd rather have you sit out on the porch

and quietly just whistle

than try to focus your attention or meditate.

Weil, the author of that original quote on attention, sometimes speaks of attention as a habit,

a continual, methodical return to a chosen focal point.

She often uses religious rituals as an illustration.

The act of focusing intently on an object, a holy name, a mantra, the Eucharist,

has the potential to transform a person's desires.

At times, she seems to believe

that the object of attention is arbitrary and beside the point.

You can achieve enlightenment by reciting the name of the Buddha,

or you can receive salvation by professing the name of your favorite cartoon character, perhaps.

If it sounds odd to you, if it sounds impossible to you, well, that's why you're not doing well.

Frankly, it's why I wasn't doing well.

I thought I was holding tight to this desire to protect my account.

Protect the account, protect the account.

We've got to protect the account today.

We've got to protect the account today.

We've got to remember the rules today.

We've got to remember the rules today.

When all along, I was being carried by the stream of wealth,

it wasn't a trying or not trying.

It wasn't a remembering the rules or not remembering the rules.

It was saying, what's going to happen is going to happen today.

What I can control is my state of mind, my state of heart.

I know the rules. I know them.

They're written in my heart.

I know how to short a stock.

I know how to close a trade.

I know what it means to stop out of a trade.

It's not like I didn't.

If knowledge was the power, then we all know how to close out a losing trade,

and we know it's better to close a losing trade than hold it.

The Greeks were wrong.

Just knowing that it's the right thing to do doesn't change anything.

If you're not spending any time free associating, looking at the birds, whistling,

putting your headphones on,

and listening to music that just inspires and invites peace into your life

or invites focus into your life, then you are filled in your mind with chatter.

That's the bigger problem.

Goodness gracious alive, do you really think we don't know how to close a losing trade?

It's that we don't know how to quiet our mind.

What matters not is the mantra that you have

or the religious icon that you look at or the whatever.

What matters is the purity of attention.

You might remember that when I came back and started living back at the country house,

which sounds really nicer than it is,

it's four acres of land with 500 trees and a lot of birds, and it was not expensive.

It's this place where I did bird watching.

You might remember that I would say things like, the bird watching is this purity of attention

where I get lost in that moment.

And that's when I was trading my best.

That was the key.

The key wasn't, we're going to protect our account today.

Recite the mantra, protect the account, that kind of stuff.

This is another idea that shows up in the work of Weil that is quoted in this essay.

If you play, play is great.

That's a great way to say it.

But the quote is, if you pay close attention to one small thing,

you will eventually come to understand all conceivable truths.

And what I mean by that is, how to keep making money without giving it all back.

The author says, that is at least what I take her to mean.

Despite how prolifically she wrote about attention,

she doesn't give much practical advice about how to cultivate it.

Her spiritual writing is runic and aphoristic, meaning it's really cryptic.

The author says, I don't really understand it, but I think this is part of its appeal,

the sense that it conceals truths that might, if they were fully comprehended, annihilate me.

That's why I was so scared of the book, The Untethered Soul.

I felt like it was going to annihilate me.

I can't describe it other than to tell you, if I told you the answer was bird watching,

or your version of whatever that is,

drawing, art, knitting, creation, praying, whatever.

If I told you that, it would strip away all the excuses,

and it would be the simplest of things to do, which would frighten you,

because A, it would mean that it was really easy all along,

and B, because it's not complicated anymore,

it doesn't make you special to have achieved it.

Meaning, making money isn't the achievement.

It's the state of mind and the state of your heart that you reached that's the achievement

that comes before all of it.

The making money thing, trading is easy.

Friends, trading is easy.

You wait for it, you take it, you stop it if it's not good, you keep it going if it is.

Those are easy things to do, but they're impossible in the wrong state of mind.

They're impossible with the wrong state of your heart.

So they're easy things to do.

It's easy to run.

You put your legs in front of the other, and you speed it up.

So why don't we all do it?

It's because of the state of our mind, the state of our heart.

It's easy to buy a piece of fruit instead of a piece of cake.

We don't do it because of the state of our heart.

Trading isn't about following instructions.

It's about knowing who you are deep inside and letting go of the result.

Don't care anymore about the result.

It'll just take care of itself, and you've heard me say that before.

Listen, open any memoir, any personal essay, the author says, and you will find the same story.

I was lost, and now I'm found.

I was sick, and now I'm well.

I believed in something, but that belief was hollow.

It's like, I didn't realize it until I'm doing this episode.

That's what this episode sounds like.

I was lost, and I was making $20,000 a day, but I was lost, but now I'm found,

and I've realized this thing, and my old belief was hollow.

That person who believed in is dead.

Listen, you've heard that story over and over.

You could tell it in your sleep.

We never learn.

As I say these words, we never learn.

As I say these words, I'm doing only the slightest of good jobs

at everything I just told you.

I'm doing it for the last four days, five days, the week.

I've done a better job of less rumination

and more absolute focus on a word, on a mantra,

or on the peaceful outside time that I have.

So who am I to say anything?

I'm not the answer, and I don't know anything, my friends.

Maybe this is the answer, and maybe it's not, but I'll tell you one thing.

I'm more content.

I'm more happy, and yeah.

Yeah, I'm trading better too.

What saved Weil from suicide when Weil talks about it is this.

After months of inward darkness, she says, I suddenly had the everlasting conviction

that any human being, even though practically devoid of natural faculties,

can penetrate to the kingdom of truth reserved for genius if only he longs for truth

and perpetually concentrates all his attention upon its attainment.

If you are devoid of quote-unquote natural trading ability,

so what?

Who cares?

You know how to open a chart?

You know how to click a button?

Please don't ask for any pity.

Okay, please, please don't.

I don't know enough about trading.

Please, please, please, just stop it with that garbage.

You want the truth?

You want the highest form of doing well at this job?

You want the kingdom of truth and wealth preserved for the geniuses?

Then long for truth.

Perpetually concentrate your attention on its attainment.

Today I did an experiment.

All day long, I told myself in the car, on the way, in my affirmations in the morning,

I just repeated the same thing in my mind over and over.

Every quiet moment, every moment I had where I found myself with a moment to myself,

I just repeated it.

I had such a peaceful day today and I did okay trading today too

and I wasn't making good decisions at the beginning but I caught myself.

I caught myself because I was focused.

I was attentive to the heart.

It's not, you know, people say, oh, I'm not good at meditation.

It's not what I'm saying.

What I'm saying is, what is the highest truth for you?

Well, certainly not wait for the moving average to cross over the diddly doo.

No, that's not it.

It's something so deep.

It's something fundamental.

It's this allowing yourself to love yourself enough to spend a quiet moment with yourself

and focus your attention on whatever.

Some person named Iris Murdoch, drawing on wheels ideas,

agreed that attention is a better method than willpower when it comes to remedying our faults.

We often assume that we're free at any moment to make any decision we want

but by the time we find ourselves facing temptation or an ethical dilemma,

we've already become the kind of person who's destined to make a particular choice.

The moral life, writes Murdoch, is not about self-mastery and the crucible of moral struggle.

It's about conditioning our will through continuous acts of attention,

turning our minds each day to virtue so that in decisive moments,

we're automatically compelled in that direction.

If I attend properly, Murdoch writes, I will have no choice

and this is the ultimate condition to be aimed at.

In other words, really, we're just obeying.

We're not commanding.

When you say, I'm gonna set a goal and I'm gonna map it out

and I'm gonna blah, blah, blah, blah, you're commanding instead of obeying

but when you say, I'm gonna let myself flow

with the river of wealth that is all over the earth,

then you've reached some state that is useful in trading.

It doesn't have to be meditation.

It doesn't have to be bird watching.

It doesn't have to be quiet focus in a Zen position.

You don't have to cross your legs and think about your spleen.

You could go serve someone somewhere.

You could do a good work.

You could, there's a variety of other ways to do it.

Paul said in the Bible, please forgive me because it's just a quote from the essay.

It's not that I'm trying to get all Christian on you or something like that.

He says, finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble,

whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable,

if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about such things.

If you're watching a video on Twitter, if you're watching a show on Fox News,

if you're watching MS Now and you're seeing some talking head bloviate

about how stupid some Senate candidate is, or if you've got yourself worked up

about political candidates or the president of the United States

or the blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, go serve somebody, go sweep somebody's driveway,

go take someone's trash can in, go bird watching and shut that shit off.

We got enough problems quieting the stupid, angry, sad, critical,

insulting voices in our own minds.

We don't need more of that.

I love you.

I don't even know you, but I love you and I appreciate you for listening to this.

I know you're better than this because I'm the worst of us all.

I'm the worst of us all.

I lost more money than you did last year and I lost it all in a day.

I'm the worst of all of us.

I'm the worst example of all of this.

And it's for me that I made this episode.

Perhaps what I'm doing in reading this essay and returning each day to this mantra

that I have for myself, maybe I'm not necessarily trying to understand.

Maybe I'm attuning my mind to truth to which I will eventually obey

if I pay enough attention to it.

And if I pay enough attention to it, maybe I'll finally want it.