Leadership~ by Barack Obama

Inspiration~ Warren Buffett Shares His Most Essential Advice For Generation Y

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by SEAN LEVINSON • MAY 8, 3:10PM

Warren Buffett Shares His Most Essential Advice For Generation Y

Warren Buffett assumed the role of mentor to the youth yesterday when he gave networking and career advice in an “Office Hours” session with Levo League, a site aimed to assist youngsters in making their dreams come true.

The Berkshire Hathaway CEO shared personal stories about his fear of public speaking, and notably told women to “stop holding yourself” back.

Here’s 9 points Buffett highlighted as some of the most important steps to follow on the path to success:

1. Find your passion.

“Never give up searching for the job that you’re passionate about,” he says. “Try to find the job you’d have if you were independently rich. … Forget about the pay. When you’re associating with the people that you love, doing what you love, it doesn’t get any better than that.”

2. Be careful who you admire.

“If you tell me who your heroes are, I’ll tell you how you’re gonna turn out. It’s really important in life to have the right heroes. I’ve been very lucky in that I’ve probably had a dozen or so major heroes. And none of them have ever let me down. You want to hang around with people that are better than you are. You will move in the direction of the crowd that you associate with.”

3. Learn how to communicate effectively.

While getting his MBA from Columbia University, Buffett revealed that he was “terrified of public speaking,” causing him to withdraw from a Dale Carnegie class. But after graduating he saw the ad for the course again and decided to give himself a second chance.

“I became associated with the 30 other people in the class. We couldn’t stand up in front of a group and say our own name. I mean it was — we were — it was pathetic. But that class changed my life in a big way.”

4. Develop healthy habits by studying people.

“Pick the person that has the right habits, that is cheerful, generous, gives other people credit for what they do. Look at all of the qualities that you admire in other people … and say to yourself, ‘Which of those qualities can’t I have myself?’ Because you determine whether you have them. And the truth is you can have all of them.”

5. Learn how to say “no.”

“You won’t keep control of your time, unless you can say ‘no.’ You can’t let other people set your agenda in life.”

6. Don’t work for someone who won’t pay you fairly.

“I do very little negotiation with people. And they do little with me, in terms of it … if I was a woman and I thought I was getting paid considerably less than somebody else that was equal coming in, that would bother me a lot. I probably wouldn’t even want to work there. I mean, [if] somebody’s gonna be unfair with you, in salary, they’re probably being unfair with you in a hundred other ways.”

7. Become involved with growing businesses.

“I mean, you want to get on a train that’s going to go 90 miles an hour and not one that’s gonna go 30 miles an hour and you’re gonna try to figure out how to, you know, push it along a little faster. So it really does make a huge difference. And there are some businesses that inherently [have] far more opportunities than others.”

8. Learn everything you can about your industry.

Buffett says he reads for six hours every day because he believes that growing your intellectual capacity will help you solve problems more effectively.

“I knew a lot about what I did when I was 20. I had read a lot, and I aspired to learn everything I could about the subject. “

9. Young women should seek mentors.

“These [mentoring] relationships all just evolve. I never set out to become a mentor … It’s amazing … how the person that really wants to do a terrific job just jumps out. There aren’t that many. You will be perceived as exceptional and as a worthy person for a superior to spend some extra time with if you just do something extra all the time. It seems elementary, but it’s true.”

At the end of the interview, Buffett reminded everyone to keep getting up after all falls because “you are healthy, and bright and have decades ahead of you.”

Self Development~ How to look for solution?

Ideas for life~ Solution is the right way ! Not bragging about Past with anger or sadness or disappointment !

Photo source :)

Inspiration Video~ Values in the video that you should be watching before you die.

1) Sylvester Stallone talking to his son in Rocky Balboa. 
2) Will Smith talking to his very young son in Pursuit of Happyness.
3) Al Pacino talking to his team before tan importantmatch in Any Given Sunday.

leadership~ Are you ready to lead the nation?

Link : http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/03/19/global-threats-5-challenges-for-2010/

How to prevent the next global crisis

March 19, 2010: 3:00 AM ET

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The 5 traits that connect the world's biggest threats—and what we must do to stop future ones.

by Larry Brilliant, Skoll Global Threats Fund

San Francisco recently marked the Chinese New Year, a big event here with a downtown parade, fireworks and plenty of celebration. We moved from the year of the Ox to the year of the Tiger. Perfect. 2009 saw a certain ox-like obstinacy -- stunned by the economic downturn, people, governments and economies plodded along, keeping their heads down. 2010, however, is eminently Tigerish. We face many tremendously complicated issues this year. If tigers were global threats, this year we have many by the tail.

I sit on a committee on catastrophic risks for the World Economic Forum and co-chair a national committee on biological risks established by presidential directive. I also head up a new organization, the Skoll Global Threats Fund, which focuses on threats that -- if left unchecked -- might bring the world to its knees.

Skoll Global Threats Fund is brand new -- only half a year since Jeff Skoll started this new entity -- and we are setting about trying to find ways to help mitigate the risks from climate change, water scarcity, pandemics, nuclear proliferation and conflict in the Middle East.

There are some common denominators these threats share, which are for the most part also common to other grave global problems, like the financial system meltdown, global governance failures, and disruptions of global trade that our WEF committee deals with. And for many of these factors, the year of the Tiger is a turning point, a crossroads. Here are five common denominators:

1. Communication

Society in general does a lousy job of communicating that the kinds of global threats I mentioned are true risks that could affect us all, and when we do get that point across, it's usually too late. We have plenty of examples. Take Hank Paulson and the U.S. economic crisis. Things were fine until they weren't, and then they were really bad, really fast. The Bush administration failed to manage expectations or communicate the causes and cures of the impending meltdown. The way in which the risks of inaction were presented and the palpable fear in the eyes of Paulson and other officials made the crisis worse, resulting in greater fear, paralysis, and loss of jobs.

Or take pandemics. The World Health Organization uses a classification system that sounds to non-epidemiologists like hurricane warnings. Most would think a category 5 pandemic akin to Katrina destroying New Orleans. But as a global agency, WHO has adapted a system to assess the number of countries and regions affected, so its top-numbered categories describe spread, not death rate. So while swine flu indeed became one of the most widespread diseases in human history, it did not have the death rate with which we assume a pandemic is usually associated. In this case, a nuance, but what a misleading nuance. Will people treat the next pandemic, which could be far more lethal, less seriously now that they've seen -- and survived -- a mild one?

2. Uncertainty

All of these risks share qualitative and, especially, quantitative uncertainty. Scientific uncertainty, outcome uncertainty, and the unintended consequences of any interventions are common to most of these global threats. This keeps scientists and officials up all night, but it keeps actuaries, hedge funds, and insurance companies in business. I'm an epidemiologist and we report our science with "confidence intervals." I once wrote a paper that showed how an agricultural mix-up in Michigan led to an industrial chemical, Polybrominated Biphenyls (PBB), getting into the food chain and into the milk of nursing mothers. I was not able to tell how many of Michigan's mothers had PBB in their milk, but I estimated that more than 8 million nursing mothers had a fire retardant chemical in there, and I did so "with 85% confidence." Of course, the makers of that chemical were furious, but it was the immediate need for public health action that mattered most. Far more exhaustive studies showed it is more likely that 9 million mothers in Michigan had the contaminant in their milk. But from my study of a small sample, I was not able to give more than an 85% confidence. Whether it was 8 or 9 million, my point was served -- the milk that a huge number of women were feeding their children was contaminated, and we needed to act.

Science is like that. We talk in terms of probability and inferences that can be drawn from a sample of a certain size. We make projections over time that might be x or 2x. But policy makers -- and voters -- want exact answers, not estimates. In climate change, for example, the science is astoundingly good, very complex, and breathtaking in how much data and detail has been amassed. This may be the most competently studied large-scale phenomenon in history. And while the vast majority of serious scientists agree the evidence is clear that human activity causes and can prevent global warming, they do not communicate as well as your local TV weatherman. This failure to communicate to the general public, which scientists rarely think of as their primary job, has made it hard for average people to accept estimates with confidence intervals, ranges, probability statements and the "stuff" of academic science. After all -- if you are mired in a deep recession, you want to think about today's income, not about the confidence intervals around the ranges of projections that colorless, odorless, tasteless gases will cause the global temperature and the seas to rise years in the future.

It seems true, if inconvenient, that X millions of acres of seashore, Y hundreds of millions of climate refugees, and Z billions of malaria mosquitoes will result if we don't act. But scientists won't tell you the actual numbers for X, Y or Z. They will tell you they are "90% confident that there will be between 100 million and 1 billion climate refugees." Those wide ranges, coupled with the long delay time, the intangible nature of the risks, and the complexity, make this global threat a hard sell. It is much easier, as the coal industry has done, to tell people to wait for an oxymoron that does not exist like "clean coal" instead of making hard choices today. And as the-soon-to-be- published book Merchants of Doubt catalogs, vested interests have an easier product -- "doubt" -- to sell, i.e., the "doubt" about cigarettes causing cancer, hairspray causing holes in the ozone layer, and coal and oil causing climate change.

3. Low probability

I once co-authored an article in the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty about a survey of epidemiologists four years prior to the H1N1 influenza pandemic. We polled some of the smartest, top influenza experts -- and as a group they estimated the probability of a serious pandemic in the next ten years as 10%. What do we do with information like that?

We can't say "make a 10% effort to prevent the pandemic." Indeed, is a 10% risk of a global threat something to worry about? It is if the threat is highly consequential. We should all be worried if there is a 10% chance that hundreds of millions might die, but perhaps not so much if there is a 10% chance that dozens might. And there is a cumulative effect that should force us to become more prepared -- while the individual risk of large scale drought, rapid acceleration of global warming with catastrophic weather events, rapidly spreading highly fatal pandemics, and nuclear terrorism might each be small, in the aggregate, the risk that the world will face one or more of these threats in the coming decades are too high to be ignored. The low probability of any individual threat happening makes it harder to command the attention of the public or the policy makers, but knowing the aggregate or overall risk makes it imperative to plan sane prevention and mitigation strategies.

4. Leadership

Solving these risks requires real leadership of two kinds: effective, charismatic individual leaders and trusted institutions. We lack both, sadly. Where are today's Churchills, Roosevelts, Mandelas, Gandhis? We need leaders who are willing to make the difficult decisions, even if unpopular. We need leaders who can communicate the challenges and convince people of the need to understand the issues, not only the slogans, and to spend their most precious assets -- their time and political capital -- focused on problems that seem intangible, far in the future, uncertain, and even unlikely. And it is not just the individual leaders who are falling short. The institutions to deal with these threats are suffering under the weight of their years. The United Nations is over 60 years old, but many of its key components haven't changed to adapt to today's world. Global institutions tackling pandemics, proliferation, and other threats are also showing their age.

5. Public will and governance

I separate governance from leadership because they are different, albeit connected. A leader inspires people to make difficult choices. But getting those choices enacted into legislation, regulation and changes on the ground requires governance. And in a democracy, governance around these kinds of threats is really hard. In a democracy, leaders can't lead at all if voters won't elect them, and they can't lead for long if voters do not support their decisions. Yet on these threats, we have to ask voters to focus on events of uncertain probability that in many cases won't occur for a generation. We have to ask them to sacrifice their focus on short-term issues -- jobs, family, health -- and become political activists for something that doesn't directly benefit them in the near term. People intuitively understand why protecting the planet by heading off pandemics is a good thing. But it's hard to come home at the end of the day and say, "Boy, cutting emissions felt great today." Or "I know my kids are not at risk of getting that disease, but I got them vaccinated anyway to prevent children in other parts of the world from getting it." We need public will to be fully behind these difficult policies because without political engagement from citizens and pressure from below, governments will be reluctant -- and perhaps incapable -- of making the tough decisions needed to tackle these threats.

I believe it's not an exaggeration to point out that democracy itself will be put to the test by the governance challenge these threats entail. In democracies, majorities have proven highly resistant to voting against short-term personal interests in favor of incrementally reducing the risk of potential long-term societal catastrophes. We've been able to get away with this by and large up until now. But if we are not willing to make long-term investments in education, building sustainable infrastructure, reducing energy costs and getting off dependence on oil and coal, creating solutions to global water shortages, preventing pandemics, stopping nuclear proliferation and building sustainable peace, it's not just future growth that's at risk. It is our very form of government that we risk. If democracies cannot solve these critical problems, it may not be democracy that is the winning form of governance in this next round of global competition.

To develop effective ways to counter these global threats, we need to understand what they have in common: They are hard to communicate, driving personal sacrifice and political engagement on them difficult, making both leadership and governance hard. Each of these great global threats individually may be rare, but highly consequential and, in the aggregate, they are too important to ignore. And globalization has accelerated them all. Strategies to meet these threats have to embrace all these components. And there's one more thing we need: speed. We're running out of time.

As a planet, we face huge challenges. 2010 will be a decisive year. Let's get to work figuring out the answers. Get involved. Learn about these issues, petition your leaders, demand that we prepare now, and vote for those who are working constructively to tackle these challenges. Support the work of scientists and other organizations working on solutions. Teach your kids about them. These aren't someone else's problems. They're all of ours.

Larry Brilliant joined the Skoll Global Threats Fund after serving as the first executive director of Google.org. An MD and MPH, Larry was one of a four-person U.N. team that led the successful smallpox eradication program in India and South Asia. He later founded the Seva Foundation, whose projects have given back sight to nearly 3 million people worldwide.  Larry also co-founded The Well, a pioneering digital community and was a professor of international policy and epidemiology at the University of Michigan.

leadership~ boss or leader?

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Leadership~ i'd love to think...

quotation~ by einstein

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self development~ words by Bill Gates

Bill Gates recently gave a Commencement speech at a High School about 11 things they did not and will not learn in school. He talks about how feel-good, politically correct teachings created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept set them up for failure in the real world.

Rule 1:
Life is not fair - get used to it!

Rule 2:
The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

Rule 3:
You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.

Rule 4:
If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

Rule 5:
Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.

Rule 6:
If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes; learn from them.

Rule 7:
Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

Rule 8:
Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

Rule 9:
Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.

Rule 10:
Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Rule 11:
Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.

If you agree, pass it on.
If you can read this - Thank a teacher!

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leadership~ Is Entreprenuership Better with a social mission?

Is Entrepreneurship Better With a Social Mission?

Posted: 11/28/2012 9:14 

So, you want to be an entrepreneur. You've got a great idea, and you're ready to take the leap. But there's one more question to answer: Should you add a social mission to your plan?

Social entrepreneurship, where for-profit companies have some component of charitable giving as part of their business model, is a growing trend among Gen Y entrepreneurs. One of the most well-known social ventures is TOMS, founded by Blake Mycoskie in 2006. Since inception, the company has donated more than 1 million pairs of shoes to children in need with its "buy one, give one" policy.

If you want to make a profit and make a difference in the world, read on to find the answers to some of the big questions about social entrepreneurship.

Should I launch my business first and add the social mission later?

Why wait?

Katina Mountanos and Liz Whitman, founders of New York City-based startup Manicube, caution that if you don't incorporate your social venture into your mission and value proposition from the beginning, you might run the risk of the social good becoming an afterthought.

A few other reasons to commit at the beginning:

• A social mission will set you apart from your competitors. And as a new business, standing out from your customers' other options will be key to your success.
• Your customers will get a sweet deal. Not only will they enjoy your product or service; they'll also feel good about themselves because you've involved them in contributing to a worthy cause. There's a good chance they'll share this with their friends, which is great for your word of mouth.
• You'll attract great talent. Mountanos and Whitman discovered that their employees find the social component of the business as inspiring and compelling as their customers do.
• This unique aspect of your business enhances your brand story and makes you more attractive to journalists. Pitch your vision well, and you'll likely see some press coverage.

How do I choose a beneficiary for my social mission?

When forming a social venture, you have two primary audiences: the traditional customer who buys your product or service and the beneficiary of your social mission. To make the largest impact, make sure these audiences have something in common.

Here's an example:

The Honest Company is a subscription-based online retailer that delivers natural, toxin-free baby products to their customers every week. Their chosen beneficiary is Baby2Baby, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit that provides assistance to families in need. The Honest Company has strategically chosen a partner that will benefit from the very thing they already do well, which is to create safe, eco-friendly products. They've aligned their two audiences in a way that allows the company to fulfill their overall mission: to give each child a chance at a healthy beginning.

If your new venture is a service provider, consider contributing a portion of your revenue to your choice of charity. Manicube gives Manhattan women the option to get manicures in their offices (a great time-saver). For each manicure service they sell, the company donates $1 to a female entrepreneur in the developing world.

Another thing to keep in mind when choosing a benefactor is to make sure the organization is credible and has a reputation to deliver what they promise. Mountanos and Whitman vetted their partner, Kiva, using Charity Navigator.

Is it worth it?

As a new business owner, you will have a zillion things to worry about. Adding a new aspect to the business before getting it off the ground may seem daunting and not worth the extra trouble or reduction in profit.

While managing a social venture will come with certain tensions (Who do you help? What's the best way to help them?), it's important to keep in mind that you'll be making a difference in the world. Despite your initial hesitations and the resistance you may encounter from naysayers, once you experience how amazing it feels to make that first donation, you'll do whatever it takes to feel it again.

Designer Rachel Roy, well-known for her numerous charitable collaborations, recently tweetedanother benefit of incorporating a social mission: inspiration. Roy, who believes Charity = Clarity, says that "through giving back, you gain clarity, peacefulness, happiness and balance in your own life."

Can you think of a better state of mind to be in when building your business?

Nidhi Thapar is a social entrepreneur who helps other small business owners develop their brands and market their missions. Find her on her website and Twitter. Brazen Life is a lifestyle and career blog for ambitious young professionals. Hosted by Brazen Careerist, we offer edgy and fun ideas for navigating the changing world of work -- this isn't your parents' career-advice blog. Be Brazen.

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quotes~ spread love,joy,peace

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leadership~ How Good Are Your Leadership Skills?

How Good Are Your Leadership Skills?

Who do you consider to be a good leader? Maybe it's a politician, a famous businessperson, or a religious figure. Or maybe it's someone you know personally – like your boss, a teacher, or a friend.

You can find people in leadership roles almost everywhere you look. However, simply having the responsibilities of a leader doesn't necessarily make a person an effective leader. This is a shame because, with a little study, humility and hard work, all of us can learn how to lead effectively.

So, how can you bring your leadership skills to tip-top condition?

You can start by analyzing your performance in specific areas of leadership. Complete the quiz below to help you identify where you already lead effectively, and where your skills need further development. In the analysis sections underneath, we'll direct you to the resources you need for exceptional leadership.

To find out more, >>click me<<

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leadership~ Why College Dropouts Succeed At Trading

Why College Dropouts Succeed At Trading

Good trading, Nial Fuller

What do Steve Jobs, Henry Ford and Mark Zuckerberg all have in common?

The same thing that Oprah Winfrey, Clint Eastwood, James Cameron, George Clooney, Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and Steven Spielberg all have in common…all of these famous and successful people were either college dropouts or never attended college at all. The list goes on and on: Abraham Lincoln, Ben Franklin, Frank Lloyd Wright, and a lot more.

Since the days of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, many business leaders got their starts without the benefit of degrees, including Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak of Apple, Larry Ellison of Oracle, Bill Gates and Paul Allen of Microsoft, Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz of Facebook, Michael Dell of Dell Computers, Brian Dunn of Best Buy, Anna Wintour of Vogue, Barry Diller of IAC, John Mackey of Whole Foods, David Geffen, Ralph Lauren, Ted Turner, Richard Branson and more.

So what does this have to do with trading you might wonder? A lot. Many successful traders, investors and entrepreneurs that I know, including myself, never finished or went to college. The common thread amongst myself and other college dropouts who have achieved success relatively early in life is that being a self-driven person with unrelenting passion and motivation will lead you to success no matter what field you choose.

The “red pill” or the “blue pill”?

Successful college dropouts are people who think outside of the box, risk takers, but also people who have unrelenting drive and determination. Many people don’t have these qualities. Most people just go with status quo, almost sheepishly doing what everyone else in society does just because it’s the “normal” thing to do; these are the people who struggle at trading because they are just part of the mass of people who are afraid to change how they think. Most people are afraid to take the “red pill”…if I may use a metaphor from The Matrix, and most people fail at trading…there’s a connection there. If you look at the profile of any of the successful college dropout that we discussed above, they were not afraid to take the “red pill” and had no interest in the “blue pill”.

I have always been a “red pill” kind of guy. Wanting more out of life than just the “norm”, and not wanting to follow the rest of the herd into college, I got really interested in trading when I was about 17 years old and still in high school. I actually started my first business even earlier, it was a car detailing business that I ran around my neighborhood…whilst my peers were out playing sports and going to parties, I was running my little car detailing business and sitting around thinking about how I could improve my knowledge of business and trading. This is how I’ve always been, and I purposely avoided swallowing the “blue pill” of “normal reality” because it always seemed very boring and confining to me.

I believe there’s a common mindset or thread shared between people who achieve success early-on or who don’t worry about societal norms like finishing college and having a “white picket fence house”. Being a successful trader is very much a “red pill” profession. Indeed, if you say to your parents at 18 “Mom and Dad I’m skipping college to become a Forex trader”, they are probably going to have some criticism for you to say the least, at least most parents would. It’s because being a professional trader is not “normal” it’s not status quo, and similarly, the mindset needed to become a professional trader is not status quo either.

There’s mounting evidence that a college degree is not as easy of a road to financial success as it once was. As Kathy Kristof points out in her articleThe Great College Hoax on Forbes.com, the rising cost of college combined with the crushing debt left over by student loans causes many college graduates to be stuck in mediocre paying jobs while having huge college loan debts to repay. This is not to say that college is pointless, certainly having an education is a very valuable tool, I’m just saying that it might not be for everyone and that people should research more before they dive head-first into loans and long-term commitments. Certainly, if you really want to become a full time trader, you’re probably better off skipping college all together.

There are no college courses for becoming a trader

I am an avid book reader and I have always had an unquenchable thirst to attain knowledge and learn new things. Many people go to college and just barely get by and don’t learn too much but they get a degree, because society says everyone should do that. It just always seemed a little funny to me, this notion of getting a cookie-cutter degree to have a cookie-cutter job, it also seemed mundane and very robotic. I wasn’t interested.

So, I embarked on a journey of intense self-study and self-education; especially with the internet these days, you really can teach yourself anything. If you want to get a college degree because you think it will help you in a specific field you’re interested in then more power to you. But, if you want to become a trader you’re going to have to be a very self-driven person…there is no state-certified curriculum that teaches people the skills they need to make a full-time living in the market. Most of the skills you need to trade successfully are learned in the school of “hard knocks”, indeed that’s where I forged mine.

A survey conducted by Bloomberg in 2010 showed that the school of hard knocks was the number one source (tied with the University of California) for CEOs of S&P 500 companies. Harvard was the #3 source (along with the universities of Texas, Missouri, and Wisconsin). The school of hard knocks features CEOs who never graduated from college. Of the top 400 richest Americans in 2011, 27 graduated from high school but did not attend college. Another 36 were college dropouts. The point is that you don’t need to attend or finish college to be successful, many very successful people have “made it” doing things their own way, including myself.

I am a successful trader, investor, business person and entrepreneur and I have no college experience worth talking about. Did I get some grief from some people about my decision not to attend college after high school? Yes. But, taking the “red pill” in life often leads to criticism from others, sometimes it’s out of concern / love and sometimes not. Whatever the case, taking the road less traveled is usually something that you need to a lot of mental strength and determination to do. You have to be confident in yourself and in your ability to achieve your dreams, this is what allows you to ignore the criticism and critiques from others. If you want to become a professional forex trader you’ll need these qualities as well, because you are probably going to encounter some resistance or criticism from others when you tell them your plans to become a pro trader.

Successful Forex trading requires a different skill set…

A big problem that many successful professionals in other fields run into when they try their hand at trading is that the skills they used to acquire success as a doctor, lawyer, college professor, etc, largely don’t apply to being a successful trader. Obtaining knowledge from a university and using that knowledge in a job is a very different skill set than the intense self-control, patience and mental clarity needed to succeed as a trader. You could almost say that most “common” jobs are more about dictating what you have learned outwardly, or to other people, whereas a trader has to dictate and use what he or she has learned inward, in order to navigate the markets and control their emotions at the same time. Trading really is the ultimate test of psychological control and having a disciplined mind-body connection.

This is why so many people who are successful in other professions get a big wakeup call when they start trading and subsequently lose money in the markets. They naturally assume because they are successful at their day-job they’ll be successful in the markets, but it’s not as easy as that.

The best traders listen to themselves, not to other people or their opinions. If you want to make money in the markets you have to trust your own decisions and not change your mind every time you read an opposing view on the market from someone or some website. Trading is a profession where you’re very much “inside” your own mind a lot, so for this reason it tends to attract people who take different paths in life and who don’t attend or finish college (that’s not to say people who do finish college can’t be good traders, just that it’s not required). If you can master yourself, meaning controlling your own emotional impulses as well as physical behaviors, you will have attained the “core” of what it takes to make consistent money in the markets. Everything else can be considered the “easy” part.

Conclusion:

To clarify, I am not suggesting that any current college students should dropout, nor am I trying to dissuade anyone from attending college, the point of today’s lesson is simply that becoming a professional trader largely requires skills that are not taught in any traditional school. I also wanted to stress that many successful people in the business world and elsewhere did not take the “typical” path in life; rather they followed their gut and what they “felt” was the best thing for them to do. That’s what I have always done and I personally know many others who fall into the same boat, none of us seem to have any regrets.

There’s another key element to becoming a successful forex trader that we have not talked about yet. That is, if you consider the “status-quo” within the trading community itself, we could say that it consists of things like forex indicators, expensive trading software, expensive courses and seminars, etc. Simply put, most of these things don’t work, they are basically just gimmicks. Status-quo efforts and approaches will get you status-quo results, and that’s basically true for everything. The people who make serious money in this world are investors, risk-takers and entrepreneurs; they are anything but status-quo. There’s nothing wrong with going to college, getting a degree and a “normal” 9 to 5 job, if that’s what you want and it makes you happy. However, I wanted to stress to you today that making a living in the market is going to require a lot of very non-status-quo action and thinking from you.

For example, most traders are thinking about indicators, trading robots, “secrets” to wealth, trying to trade without stop losses, etc, I would call this more of the status-quo of Forex trading. So, after realizing all of this many years ago, I finally figured out that as ironic as it seemed, simple, raw and stripped-down price action trading was about the most non-status-quo trading approach I could find, and it also made the most sense. Thus, my very non-status-quo life to that point had led me to the least status-quo trading style, but it was the one that made the most sense to me and has worked the best since. It can be hard to ignore all the things you read and hear on the web and elsewhere about trading the markets, whether it’s Forex, stocks, commodities or anything else. But, at the end of the day, it really all boils down to how well you can control your own mind and actions in the market, how well you can read a market’s raw price action, and how much you believe in yourself. Everything else related to trading is pretty insignificant.

source: http://www.learntotradethemarket.com/forex-currency-trading-blog/why-college-dropouts-succeed-at-trading