In my previous blog post, I explored how our desires shape trading outcomes—everyone gets what they want from the market. The problem is that wants are not simple—on some level, some people want to lose. Some people want escape; they want to feel that they are superior when they are anything but superior in their everyday life. Some people just want excitement. These motivations work against success, especially when we fail to understand them.

The real problem comes when we don’t understand our motivations. Self-knowledge is a slippery thing, and it’s so easy to lie to ourselves. But we know we won’t succeed unless our desires are correctly aligned. How do we begin to uncover our true motivations?

A Simple Tool

The traditional answers to this question, frankly, aren’t great, but I have good news.

There’s a simple tool that can help peel back some of the mystery in weeks, not years. It’s based on stream-of-consciousness writing, and it’s surprisingly effective. While traditional methods—decades of therapy, reading philosophers, or lifelong meditation—might not always lead to deeper self-understanding, this exercise cuts straight to the core.

But there is a way that can peel back some of the mystery and give you insight, and it can be done in weeks not years.

I first encountered this idea while experimenting with a different kind of writing, but the approach clicked when someone in our Discord mentioned “morning pages” from The Artist’s Way. The idea is simple: write three longhand pages of stream-of-consciousness, first thing every morning, indefinitely. It’s a big commitment, but one some of you should consider. (And yes, you should read the book—it’s a great book.)

How to Do It

Let me offer a shorter, results-focused version of this exercise. Commit to doing this for just two weeks, and I’m confident you’ll start to notice insights bubbling up about your desires, motivations, and even your approach to trading.

• Commit to doing this every day, without fail, for at least two weeks.
• Get up about 30 minutes earlier in the morning.
• Before doing anything else (bathroom break aside), sit down to write.
• It’s critical this is done in the morning. Do this before checking email, social media, or market prices.
• Write three longhand pages (target is roughly 750 words; there’s no magic in page count) on anything you want to. If you wish, write “This is dumb I hate it” about 125 times.
• But you probably won’t do that…
• While you might begin your writing session like that, it will soon transform into something else.
• Don’t re-read what you’ve written and don’t share it with anyone.

That’s it. That’s the whole exercise. If you do it, let me know what your results are. You might be surprised.

How Does This Work?

First of all, let me tell you that this does work. I have had transformative change flow from this (and a very similar, related exercise). Countless others have experienced the same thing. I don’t know exactly how it works—in fact, I suspect it may work differently for different people—but I can share some thoughts.

First, the value of writing longhand is that it slows your mind down. You can type faster than you can write. This is a meditative practice. You will find your mind doing some “microwandering” as you write, but, with attention and focus, you will bring your attention back to the task. One of the main struggles people face in any meditative practice is losing focus or experiencing interruptions. People think it shouldn’t happen, but it’s normal. They get frustrated by it, because they don’t realize the real value is in the constant reconnection that happens after every interruption.

So this deceptively simple exercise is a very intelligently built meditative practice. It slows your mind down and focuses you on a line of thought. There’s also a meditative quality to the rhythm of the pen on the page and to the flowing script. All of this enhances the experience in an unforced way.

Maybe the real value comes from looking through a narrow aperture. You are going to be following a mostly single thread of thought through each session. You will think about the writing throughout the day. You may dream about it. You will come back to it tomorrow sometimes with insight. You’ll want to dig deeper, or explore a related topic.

Now Do It

At the heart of success in any endeavor is a simple truth: you can’t get what you want unless you know what you really want. The exercise in this blog post is deceptively simple, but unbelievably powerful. When you sit down to write longhand every morning, without fail, you establish a commitment to yourself. The rest of your organism, and maybe the Universe itself, responds to that type of commitment. You create a ritual that allows the crud to settle from the water, so you can see with clarity what really matters.

Listen to yourself. Witness. Record. This is how you bring the unseen to the surface. This is one of the best ways to understand who you are and what you want.

I’m confident you can get more insight from this than you would from years of aimless exploration. The market reflects you. The market reflects what you bring to it, and when your desires are truly aligned with your goals, you’ll start to see that reflected in your trading outcomes.