The Habits Of Highly INEFFECTIVE People

These are habits you must avoid if you want to be effective in every area of your life.

1. Not showing up.

One of the things you can do to ensure more success in your life is simply to show up more.

If you want to improve your health then one of the most important and effective things you can do is just to show up at the gym every time you should be there.

The weather might be bad, you might not feel like going and you find yourself having all these other things you just must do. If you still go, if you show up at the gym when motivation is low you will improve a whole lot faster than if you just stayed at home lying around.

I think this applies to most areas of life. If you write or do anything more, each day perhaps, you will improve quickly. If you get out more you can meet more new friends. If you go on more dates you chances of meeting someone special increases. Just showing up more can really make a big difference.

2. Procrastinating half the day. 

Do the most important thing first. What this means is simply to do the hardest and most important task of the day first thing in the morning. A good start in the morning lifts your spirits and creates a positive momentum for the rest of the day.

Take small bites. Don't try to take one big bite. It becomes overwhelming which leads to procrastination. Split a task into small actionable steps. Then just focus on the first step and nothing else. Just do that one until it's done. Then move on to the next step.

Knowing Your (Trading) Limits

Before you begin a trade, you should have an idea of where you need to cut loss. Let's say you have $100,000 cash and you wanted to buy a stock priced at $1.00. Suppose that the cut loss for that stock is at $0.90. The potential loss is $0.10 (1.00 - 0.90). Since 2% of your equity of $100,000 is $2,000, you can at most lose $2,000 on any trade. We can thus calculate backwards to determine the position sizing of this particular trade in order to limit the loss to a maximum of $2,000. We'll take $2,000 divided by the potential loss of $0.10, and we get 20,000 shares, or 20 lots.

So if you buy 20 lots of the stock at $1.00 and if the price drops by 10% (0.1/1.00), the loss is just limited to $2,000, which is just 2% of our total equity. By following strictly to the 2% rule, you will prevent any one trade from wiping you out. In fact, you'll need 50 such trades before your whole capital is wiped out. Unless you un-wisely choose to enter 50 positions in one go.

Variables will be the number of lots and the percentage of price drops. The absolute amount ($2,000) will be contstant.

How Do You Know What Your Core Values Are?

To help you understand the values you believe in, look at the people you respect. Who are the people you look up to? Why? What qualities do you admire in them?

Just write it down. Now, on your piece of paper you have just identified the traits or characters that you admire and and therefore value. These are your core values that you subconsciously cherish and give weight to.