Perseverance is the courage to endure. Trading will be very difficult. There are stories of how people have made easy fortunes in the market, literally overnight, starting out with next to nothing in capital. Some of these stories are true, but many more are not. The majority of successful traders toil long hours and many years in achieving success. Even the best traders probably experienced one or more crises sometime in their career. Some of these dark times might have derailed others, but the better traders withstood the pressure because of their perseverance.

What can make trading even harder is that you may have a valid trading strategy, but an outside event may cause it to perform badly. Unforeseeable events totally outside of your control can have immediate and devastating impacts on the market. These events can immediately affect your profit and loss statement and ultimately your psyche. There is little consolation knowing you have a good idea but bad results, and certainly even less consolation in your trading account.

No matter how well thought out your plan, no matter how much you believe in yourself, there will come a time when you will wonder if all the stress and turmoil is worth going through. Trading will physically and mentally batter you, so it becomes all the more necessary to persevere. Perseverance rekindles your fervor to trade and keeps you in the game when others quit. Perseverance provides the power to continue your introspection and strengthen your confidence. Perseverance is the light that illuminates the path in dark and difficult times.

It is not enough to just introspect and have confidence; we must also be able to accept or change whenever we look within. Otherwise we will refuse to look again. This is not such an easy task. We must go through a three-step process:

 

1. Work to find out who we are.

2. Accept our-self for who we are.

3. Work to change our-self for the better and accomplish the task.