Interpretations that would result in a more satisfying experience

---

a cycle of pain and dissatisfaction. However, there is one tangible benefit to be gained from blaming 
the market for what you wanted and didn't get.
You can temporarily shield yourself from your own harsh self-criticism. I say "temporarily" because, 
when you shift responsibility, you cut yourself off from whatever you needed to learn from the 
experience. Remember our definition of a winning attitude: a positive expectation of your efforts with 
an acceptance that whatever results you get are a perfect reflection of your level of development and 
what you need to learn to do better. If you shift the blame in order to block the painful feelings that 
result from beating yourself up, all you've done is put an infected Band-Aid on the wound. You may 
think you have solved the problem, but the problem is only going to resurface later, worse than before. 
It has to, simply because you haven't learned anything that would cause you to make the land of 
interpretations that would result in a more satisfying experience.
Did you ever wonder why leaving money on the table is often more painful than taking a loss? When 
we lose, there are any number of ways in which we can shift the blame to the market and not accept 
responsibility. But when we leave money on the table, we can't blame the market. The market didn't do 
anything but give us exactly what we wanted, but for whatever reason, we weren't capable of acting on 
the opportunity appropriately. In other words, there's no way to rationalize the pain away. You are not 
responsible for what the market does or doesn't do, but you are responsible for everything else that 
results from your trading activities. You are responsible for what you have learned, as well as for 
everything you haven't learned yet that's waiting to be discovered by you. The most efficient path to 
discovering what you need to be successful is to develop a winning attitude, because it's an inherently 
creative Dersoective. Not onlv does a winnin? attitude onen vou un to what you need to learn; it also 
produces the land of mind-set that is most conducive to discovering something no one else has 
experienced. Developing a winning attitude is the key to your success. The problem for many traders is 
that either they think they already have one, when they don't, or they expect the market to develop the 
attitude for them by giving them winning trades. You are responsible for developing your own winning 
attitude. The market is not going to do it for you, and, I want to be as emphatic as I can, no amount of 
market analysis will compensate for developing a winning attitude if you lack one.
Understanding the markets will give you the edge you need to create some winning trades, but your 
edge won't make you a consistent winner if you don't have a winning attitude. Certainly one could 
argue that some traders lose because they don't understand enough about the markets and therefore they 
usually pick the wrong trades. As reasonable as this may sound, it has been my experience that traders 
with losing attitudes pick the wrong trades regardless of how much they know about the markets. In 
any case, the result is the same—they lose.
On the other hand, traders with winning attitudes who know virtually nothing about the markets can 
pick winners; and if they know a lot about the markets, they can pick even more winners. If you want 
to change your experience of the markets from fearful to confident, if you want to change your results 
from an erratic equity curve to a steadily rising one, the first step is to embrace the responsibility and 

---

stop expecting the market to give you anything or do anything for you. If you resolve from this point 
forward to do it all yourself, the market can no longer be your opponent. If you stop fighting the 
market, which in effect means you stop fighting yourself, you'll be amazed at how quickly you will 
recognize exactly what you need to learn, and how quickly you will learn it. Taking responsibility is 
the cornerstone of a winning attitude. 
CH 
APTER