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The necessity of losing and why it makes sense and cents.

May 05, 2010 10:19 AM ET
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Imagine for a second that you got up and from this day hence forward you just kept winning every time you played the markets. Sooner than later winning would become boring, because you would not have anything to compare your wins to. The reason a win feels so good is because you compare it to a point in time when you lost something. Not only do you bask in the new felt emotion (because you remember the pain of losing), but you also feel incredibly great because of the financial windfall from that win. What we are trying to state here is that losing or failing is an important and integral part of winning and success and that without the other life would be drab and dry.
However, what happens over time is that most individuals seem to think that they can do nothing but fail or lose. The way to stop this evil process is to immediately understand the purpose of losing and failing. When you lose or fail it means you have done something wrong, you are being given a second chance to evaluate where you might have strayed or erred. Most of us instead just keep doing the same thing that made us experience our first loss, and we hope that sooner or later we will hit the mother load by luck. If we examine the reason we lost or failed, we see exactly what it was that caused us to fall off the tracks, and, even if we don’t succeed on the next attempt, we will at least make sure that we never ever repeat the same mistake again. Through constant analysis of our mistakes, we can finally develop a system or systems that can with patience and persistence help us win in the markets and more importantly help us with the most important battle in our lives: the quest to find happiness, which is really nothing other than the quest to find inner peace. Remember this too, nothing good ever comes easy; if it did it was not worth it in the first place.
Imagination was given man to compensate for what he is not, and a sense of humor to console him for what he is.
~ Francis Bacon 1561-1626, British Philosopher, Essayist, Statesman

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