I had an interesting question come up the other day from a group of college students, and it got me reflecting on my past. One student asked:

“What did being a professional athlete teach you?”

My answer was simple: Everything. And I mean that. Everything.

I don’t often think about my life before I was 12—not because I purposely avoided it, but because I was a boy without direction back then. I cared too much about what people thought of me. My feelings were easily hurt, and I spent most of my days wishing I could be someone else. It’s not easy to admit, but that’s the truth.

When you’re adopted, it’s hard to have a sense of identity. The upside? There’s a world of possibilities in front of you. The downside? There’s no core identity to lean on. Some people grow up with a strong family heritage, a lineage tied to culture, religion, or a family business—something that grounds them. Maybe they take pride in their Irish roots, their Greek heritage, or their family’s generations of business ownership or coal mining. But what happens when you don’t know your own ethnicity? When your biological family is a mystery, and the family that adopts you, no matter how great, feels different from you in so many ways?

How do you get comfortable in your own skin? How do you build confidence when you’re not sure where you came from?

My grandmother used to tell me that bike riding gave me confidence. As a kid, I didn’t really get what she meant, but now I see it. She was right—it gave me the confidence to be myself.

Today I’m comfortable being myself. That’s something I know I learned from riding in the sport of Bmx. It gave me an identity—a foundation. And yes, it even helped me learn to bea better trader by teaching me a step by step methodology. 

To succeed at anything—whether it’s bike riding or trading—you need to work hard, be consistent, and manage risk. In bike riding, managing risk meant wearing a helmet and taking calculated risks so I wouldn’t get hurt before the next event. In trading, it means staying aware of your emotions and understanding the risk of every trade before you get in.

And we all know the importance of risk management, don’t we?

The biggest lesson I learned, though, was how to fail—and fail well. To become great at anything, you’re going to go through pain and hardship. By the end of my riding career, I had ruptured my spleen, battled bone infections, gone through six knee surgeries, had rotator cuff surgery, and faced a laundry list of other injuries.

So how does this tie into trading?

Learning to trade is like looking at the chart of any stock. There are ups and downs, smooth periods, and moments of intense volatility. You’re going to experience pain—it may not be physical, but it’s going to test you mentally. If you don’t have the mental toughness to push through, you won’t make it.

Even the best traders go through rough patches. The key is to push through those tough times because better times are always ahead.

But more than anything, the most valuable lesson I learned was the importance of having a vision—a clear picture of the future. As a kid, I’d sit in school, at a friend’s house, or even in bed at night, dreaming about the tricks I wanted to learn on my bike. I wasn’t good enough at 12 to pull them off, and some tricks took me six or seven years to finally master. But I’d envisioned them so many times in my head that by the time I actually tried it, it felt like I’d already done them many times before. 

It’s the same with trading. You have to envision your trades working out and imagine numbers in your account growing, and—most importantly—conjure the person you want to become.

It all starts with picturing the life you want.

Whether it’s in sports, trading, or everyday life, it all comes down to vision, perseverance and the ability to embrace failure as part of the journey. Being a professional athlete taught me how to handle setbacks, manage risks, and keep going when things got tough.

It taught me how to push through mental and physical pain, to be able to see beyond the present challenges, and to focus on the long game.(This is my 5th post this week, there are no new signals or trades to put on. Paid subscribers, keep holding on to our positions and keep riding the trend. We hit a new equity high today in both of our portfolios!