Recently, I was thinking about the topic that I am writing about here, and I was thinking as follows: in order to invest or speculate successfully, you need to understand where you went wrong if you failed, and do your best not to repeat the same mistakes. Even better, to be successful, you must purely do what works at the right time, in the right way. Personally, I think that’s the hardest part of any investment of any kind.

Genuine success of any kind depends on knowing every inch of failure and how not to do it again if you did when you tried to achieve success. If you can understand that statement, you can really get somewhere. If you rely on initial luck and “luck of the draw” on success, you won’t really get anywhere. In short, the reality is fully understanding how to fail and not fail, and instead doing what leads to genuine success. After all, people judge you by your true successes, not by the many misunderstandings and temporary failures that led to your ultimate true success.

In that sense, “We all love to win, but who likes to train?” takes on a very ancient meaning. Failure, used correctly, is the last stepping stone to true success, especially in investing, futures and that sort of thing and more.

I remember Thomas Edison and his quote that “I have found ten thousand ways not to invent the light bulb, and one way to do it.” That is the reality of true success when investing, playing poker, or anything that requires a cognitive understanding of when to act, when not to act, when to pull back, and when to move forward. In short, there are many ways to lose, but only one genuine way to ultimately win after understanding all those ways to lose: work your way to success. You don’t depend on luck, you don’t revere the first time “lucky” happens, success comes through that trial and error work of understanding. For those who think I’m a pessimist and not the ultimate optimist in understanding the nature of all games that require investment and future products of all sorts in a genuinely ultimate capitalist way, there’s always the Bernard “Bernie” Madoff way of fake it until you genuinely fail, or do whatever it takes to actually succeed (as the true ultimate capitalist that I am), which I genuinely prefer. Doing what it takes is really not so much about skill as it is about understanding how to succeed by finding all the ways to fail until success is certain. Why do you think Jason “Jay” Gould technically died a failure and Abraham Lincoln it is remembered as one of our greatest US Presidents, because in his lifetime, he found every way to fail until he succeeded, whereas Gould, though successful in business, for most of his life cut corners at crucial moments in instead of failing intelligently. I get it. Gould died of a heart attack from the stress of maintenance, Lincoln had to be removed by a January 6, 2021 fate killer who wanted attention in a pitiful way. I get it: he wins the right way, or suffers a fate that gives you “get away with” in the mirror if no one else immediately knows what you lied or tried to cheat about.