After trading profitably for a living every year since 2000, in late Jan of 2018 I lost 500k in an hour in the XIV blowup. It destroyed me mentally. I Couldn’t think clearly for 18 months. Couldn’t stop “trying to get my money back” which just made it worse.

Finally, I shut it all down scared shitless that I couldn’t trade any more. I had to protect what was left of what I had built over the previous years. The village of idiots in my head had somehow taken over the castle.
I had to dive deep and fully accept the financial loss and so many other life losses that I was carrying with bitterness and anger to find neutral again. My career had become my compulsion to fix the wrongs of the past, my opiate that had huge hangovers.
Thru the painful process of true awareness of what I was doing, I started day trading 100 shares of AAPL just to keep connected to my roots. Not thinking, not caring just trading my feel of the day from all that I had seen over the years.
Not caring was liberating. It felt so good to trade and simply not give a shit if I made money or not. I just flipped 100 shares around based on my feel of the tape and I did this for 3 months while I licked all my wounds trying to figure out how to let it all go. Summer 2019.
The 1st month I made like 1500, 2nd month over 2k, and by the third month I had bumped to 200 shares without really realizing it, had 1 red day and made over 5k. So in Sept of 2019 I realized “well, fuck, I guess I’m a day trader.”
Don’t care, don’t think, trade the tape.....just like I did as a swing trader before I went off deep end.

The rebuilding process has had its ebbs and flows as I’ve grown and clarified my structure. I’m trading more than AAPL now and I’m not trading 200 shares anymore.
I’ve grown about 15-20x since that realization 16 months ago that I was now a day trader, and I’m starting to think and care again which worries me.

So here’s to 2021. Don’t care, Don’t think, Trade the tape. It’s just another way of saying “Be Dumb, Follow Price”

HNY to all🙏🏻
Hope this story helps everyone realize that U never arrive. U never stop evolving. Success is not a straight line. Bad shit will happen, and u can overcome it again and again. That’s what humans do.

Let’s do this.

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Many of you have seen the famous Westrum Organizational Typology model, so prominently featured in State of DevOps Research, Accelerate, DevOps Handbook, etc.

This model was created Dr. Ron Westrum, a widely-cited sociologist who studied the impact of culture on safety


Thanks to Dr. @nicolefv, I was able to interview him for an upcoming episode of the Idealcast! 🤯

It was a very heady experience, and while preparing to interview him, I was startled to discover how much work he's done in healthcare, aviation, spaceflight, but also innovation.

I've read 4+ of his papers, so I thought I was familiar with his work. (Here's one paper:
https://t.co/7X00O67VgS)

I was startled to learn he has also studied in depth what enables innovation. He wrote a wonderful book "Sidewinder: Creative Missile Development at China Lake"


Dr. Westrum writes about China Lake Research Labs: "its design and structure had one purpose: to foster technical creativity. It did; China Lake operated far outside the normal envelope... Sidewinder & others were "impossible" accomplishments,

I love this book because it describes traits of organizations that routinely create and maintain greatness: US space program (Mercury, Gemini, Apollo), US Naval Reactors, Toyota, Team of Teams, Tesla, the tech giants (Amazon, Google, Netflix, Google)

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