Jared F. Martinez (The FX Chief™) is an author, forex mentor, educator, market analyst and entrepreneur, as well as the founder of Market Traders Institute, Inc. (MTI).
If you want to chase after something or if you want to become a great Forex trader, there are only two ways to go about it.
The first way is to put your money in the market and learn through trial and error. You get to make your own mistakes that way. But let me tell you something, you better write them down because the way our mind works is we forget 80% of everything we’ve been taught and done within the first three days.
As you continue to execute trades with no mentorship, with no one helping you, with no one guiding you, then you’re going to repeat mistakes and those mistakes are going to cost you money. And if you started with a $10,000 trading account, then as you learn from your mistakes that first mistake may cost you $1,000.
Your next mistake could cost you $500. The following mistake may cost you $300. The next one after that may cost you $2,000. How much are you willing to pay for your mistakes?
It doesn’t matter what line of business you go in, you still need a mentor.
Think through this. How many times have you driven around town and you see a brand new independently-owned restaurant that opens up? You also see another chain restaurant set to open, perhaps an Olive Garden or Red Lobster that already have thousands of locations throughout the country.
Let’s say the independently-owned restaurant and a chain restaurant both open new locations at the same time. Then a year later the privately-owned restaurant is closed down and the chain restaurant has a line of people that goes around the block waiting to get in. See, everything has a formula. If you don’t take the time to learn the formula, you won’t become successful within the timeline you set.
Timelines are critical. It’s just like if you open up a trading account with $10,000. You can’t start trading and learn from your own mistakes and take it down from $10,000 to zero.
You see, you’re slowly going out of business kind of like the restaurant that closed. The restaurant owner didn’t learn the formula. And within a year’s time, the owner just slowly goes out of business because he’s not doing all the right things.
The second way you can learn to become a successful trader or to open up a successful restaurant is to follow the guidelines or the formula of a successful trader or restaurant.
Follow the guidelines and follow the formula, like the FX Chief teaches, like we teach here at Market Traders Institute, so that you can become a successful trader because…
Finding a mentor in your life is like finding a map to a gold mine.
Now think through this, you want to learn to become a successful Forex trader. You look at charts. Those charts look like hills, and as the saying goes, “There’s gold in them thar hills.” You just have to learn the formula to extract the gold.
But see, finding a mentor is like finding a map to a gold mine, which beats going up to that mountain and kicking over all kinds of rocks trying to find a little piece of gold, perhaps to find the vein that leads to the Mother Lode.
You may be up that mountain looking for a year. You may be up there looking for five years. You may be up there 10 years before you find any sort of vein that leads to the Mother Lode. But when you have a mentor in your life, it’s like acquiring that map that immediately takes you to the vein that leads to the Mother Lode.
Now, it becomes your responsibility to start to extract that gold. When you create a dream in your mind or heart for yourself and you want to chase it, that is when desire is born. It is that desire that forces you to chase after that dream that is born in your mind and/or heart. See, that desire creates ambition and ambition becomes the main factor to focus on.
Concentration, focus, desire, and ambition find their way to success regardless of the cost. People often ask, “Chief, how did you become so successful?” I tell them that my focused money mindset has always been greater than my challenges and my problems. See, when you have a dream in your life, challenges and problems will surface every day but you can’t sit there and whine like a little baby.
Think about it. How many times do you wake up and say, “God, I just can’t believe I’m going through all these problems. What’s the deal about this? Can you believe this happened?”
You know what? Believe it. The reality of the situation is that If you’re going to go into business for yourself, if you’re going to become a successful trader or if you’re going to become successful at anything, then you have to become a master at overcoming challenges and problems and you can’t whine about it. You can’t sit there and not expect bad things to happen because anything and everything is going to happen.
You have to be able to say, “I’m ready for my next battle. I’m ready for my next problem. I’m ready for my next burden to overcome. I’m ready for my next challenge to plow through.”
That’s the mindset you have to have when it comes time to become a trader. Clever is he that learns from his mistakes, but a truly wise person learns from the mistakes of others.
The critical part about finding a mentor is that you save so much time and money by learning from the mistakes of your mentor rather than from your own mistakes. Don’t try to be clever. Our egos get so big that sometimes we tell ourselves, “I could do this. I can do this.”
Yes, you know what? You can do it. You get to make all those mistakes in the world that you want to make, that’s your ride. But why do you want to waste time, money, and energy, and keep making mistakes? When you can go to a mentor instead and have them say to you, “Don’t do that. Been there, done that. Don’t go down that road.”
Now, a true mentor is someone who sees more talent and ability within you, than you see in yourself, and helps bring it out of you. When I became a trader, it was tough. And let me tell you, in those first five years I would have died to have a mentor who saw more potential in me than I saw in myself, because I didn’t see much potential in me.
There were days that I wanted to throw in the towel. There were days that I wanted to just give up and walk away, and when it comes down to that, we can give in. We could give up or we can give it all we got and that’s what I chose to do. I chose to give it all I got. And so, you know what? I’m not here by accident.
I’ve learned that great traders just don’t happen. Great traders are individuals who have known struggle. They’ve known defeat. They’ve known loss. They’ve been violated. They’ve been hurt. They’ve been cheated. They’ve been given false information, where they lost lots of money in the market. They have literally gone to the bottom of the financial barrel but they had the courage to stand up and to fight their way back from hell.
And because of that, they are now more compassionate to other traders that are trying to become successful like them. They’re more understanding. They’re willing to help more because where you are now I’ve been there too. If you’re sitting here right now struggling in the market, and you’re trying to become this successful trader for your family, I’ve been there.
It’s a horrible place to be. But I’m going to tell you this right now, I would have sold my house to find a guy like me. A guy that could help me find my way to become that successful trader. Great traders just don’t happen. Great traders are made.
And so you need to realize that a lot of people have gone further than they ever thought possible because they had a mentor in their life. They had someone who could help guide that individual down the road they needed to go.
A great mentor empowers a person to see a possible future and believe it can be obtained.
If another man can do it, then you can do it. Think about that. There is no difference between a man that’s successful and a man that’s managing his mediocrity or a man that lives in poverty. There’s no difference. They both have two arms and two legs. All three of them have two arms, two legs, two eyes, two ears and one head.
They have to go to the bathroom. They have to sleep. Think about it. They are virtually the same. The only difference that makes this person poor, this person manages mediocrity, and this other person manages his success is what they know to do and what they know not to do. And they stayed disciplined in not doing what they shouldn’t do.
Most successful people, believe it or not, are not only mentors themselves but they also have mentors in their life. One of the greatest values of mentors is their ability to see ahead what others can’t see, and to help them navigate a course to their destination.
Now, when we start a business for ourselves, we usually fall in love with that business. We get emotional in managing that business many times when challenges surface.
We’re so in love with that business that we try to solve the problems emotionally. And the more we try to solve problems emotionally, the more we find ourselves in trouble. A mentor could come into your life and one of his greatest values is the ability to see ahead what others can’t see while you’re sitting there being emotional.
Think about it. Mentors are not emotional. Mentors are not living your life. Mentors are not literally having to go through what you’re going through. He’s already gone through what you’re going through. But he’s not going through it now. So he’s calm and relaxed and sees clearly while you are feeling emotional about the situation. You can’t see things clearly.
So in closing, I challenge you to seek out teachers and mentors that challenge you to think for yourself. Find mentors who will hold you accountable and who will push you to grow and guide you to find your own voice. If you want to become a successful Forex trader, let everybody here at Market Traders Institute be a mentor who will take you places you never thought possible that you could go to as a trader.
