Happiness is a Discipline | Podcast Episode #463

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Hey everybody, this is Ryan Mallory with shareplanner.com’s Swing Trading the Stock Market.

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In today’s episode, it’s going to be a little bit of a different one. I’m not taking a e-mail today from anybody at every once in a while, I like to address a topic that I that I find particularly important and it always does relate back to trading. And then this one, it may not seem like it relates to trading at first, but stick with me until the end because it does relate to trading quite significantly. So title of this podcast, you probably already know this.

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Happiness is a discipline. Now, that’s a little bit of a odd topic as it relates to trading, but you look at a lot of traders, they’re frustrated. They’re, they’re ready to throw it all in.

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They’re they’re very upset. And usually the reason why they get into the stock market is because of a lack of happiness as well.

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But just like the stock market, if you’re going to pursue happiness in life, if you want happiness, you have to have a measure of discipline. In fact, there’s no happiness without discipline.

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You look at my life and, and where this comes from is really the, the the last few days I’ve been dissecting this is, you know, quite a bit.

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And when I look at the things that make me a happy in life, the things that I get the most satisfaction from, it requires discipline.

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The things that drag me down that make me feel, you know, less than happy or unhappy for that matter, are the ones that do not require any discipline.

1:23
The things that are the easiest avenues to pursue in life are the things that drag me down. So I, I take there’s about 5 areas in my life that I consider my priorities. 1 is my faith in God.

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Jesus Christ is my savior. I put my whole faith and trust in him.

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That is a huge part of who I am, my faith and the disciplines that come with it. Now that includes spending time reading the Bible each day, time and prayer, being involved in ministry, being involved in reading other books that support what I’m doing in regards to my faith.

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Now, I know that not everybody shares my faith and, and, and that’s, that’s a choice that everybody has.

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People believe in different things.

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Regardless of what you believe, you, you know, whether you’re atheist or whether you’re Christian or Muslim or Hindu, you believe in something.

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For me, I believe in, in, in Jesus Christ. That’s my faith, but that requires a discipline.

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But where do I get the most happiness out of? It comes from my faith, and that requires a discipline approach to it.

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If I don’t invest in it, I’m not going to feel connected in my faith. It’s just not going to happen.

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The second one is my wife. She’s she’s my top priority here on earth.

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God first, my wife second. A lot of happiness is derived from her.

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My 3rd is my family, my children, they are also a top priority for me. My 4th one would be my career, my work, what I do as a swing trader and what I do with SharePlanner. That is a huge priority for me in life.

3:02
So major emphasis on those facets of life. And then the fifth one, you might be wondering what that one is because I haven’t got to it yet.

3:10
But the fifth one is my hobbies. If you follow me on Twitter, you see me talk about the, the pizzas that I made or the smash burgers or a lot of different things that whether it’s the old fashions, I, I love making those things. I love inviting people over and making it for them.

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It’s a, it’s a huge part of what I do. I, I, I enjoy doing it quite a bit.

3:32
But all of those things, all those, if you, you dwindle it down to just even pizza making when I’m doing it as a hobby, what does that require?

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It requires discipline. I had to get up in the mornings.

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I didn’t have to make the Polish. I have to make the dough.

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My wife makes the marinara and I, you know, I got to go to the store and make sure we have cheese for the pizza.

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If you don’t do any of that, and that requires a little preparation, a little bit of discipline, you’re not going to have a pizza later that night.

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And you extrapolate that into the areas of my trading. Trading probably more than anything requires discipline.

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That’s why I’m always talking about risk management. That’s a discipline.

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And so you take go from there to the family and to the wife it you have to be disciplined in making sure that you’re carving out time.

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It’s easy, no matter how much you love a person, to forget about them at times, to get caught up in your work or to get caught up in what what some of your friends might be doing.

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And when you do that, you’re becoming undisciplined in your approach to your family. So those are the five areas in life.

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Now what about the five areas? Or actually, it’s way more than 5 areas that dragged me down.

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And there is a lot of those that can drive me, drag me down. One, social media is a huge 1.

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And now what what’s crazy about all these that I’m about to go over and there’s trust me, there’s a lot of them.

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All of these are very easy to do, incredibly easy. And if I and if I engage in them or engaging them at least for too long, it will definitely drag me down.

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There’s very little reward that comes from any of these.

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Like I said, the first one being social media. I start going through the I call it getting caught up in the scrolls.

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I hate getting caught up in the scrolls because it’s hard to get out of it. You know, you just go on Instagram and you start looking at all the memes.

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You can’t ever get out of it hardly Before you know it, I’ve, I’ve sent, you know, 50 funny memes to my wife.

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And yes, they are funny and it’s fun to watch her laugh at them, but in the end, probably not the best use of time and definitely not bringing me happiness either.

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Just, you know, spending time on on social media for too long. So you could categorize that under electronics or if you’re playing video games, you could consider it that way too.

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So social media, video games and it and I’m not trying to villainize going on to these things saying, oh, it’s bad, but it doesn’t necessarily bring happiness.

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It might bring relaxation at times.

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It’s like, oh man, I just needed a mental break. Yeah, I get that.

5:55
OK, but how often, you know, like if I get up in the morning and I’m like, you know what, I’m going to watch this, you know, this new show that’s out and I’m going to binge watch it for a couple hours in the morning.

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It’s Saturday morning.

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I’ll get to the, you know, the, the, the projects that I need to get done around the house later, later on.

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But by the time I watched a few shows, it’s all of a sudden midday. I still got to go to Lowe’s.

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I got to go pick up, you know, everything that I need to do. And so that that discipline, yes, again, I’m not trying to say that having mental breaks taken, taken time away from some of the rigors of life isn’t important.

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But when you indulge in it for too long, it, it, it’s not bringing you happiness in the end.

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It might bring you a little bit of relaxation, but a little bit of too much relaxation doesn’t really doesn’t really get you too, too far.

6:49
So another one that I think that’s interesting and I think we’ve all dealt with this. We all have our own stories as it, as it pertains to our experiences with people around us dying.

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And but I think I think death can really drag people down. And the closer they are, obviously the more it’s going to hurt.

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Whether it’s a, if it’s a kid, it’s going to really hurt. If it’s a parent, it’s going to hurt.

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If it’s a brother or a sister, it’s going to hurt. I’ve lost a mother and A and a brother that, that that were both very dear to me.

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My brother was my best friend. I, I was 19, he was 25 when he died.

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You know, he died from testicular cancer. So that, that was a huge impact in my life.

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And then even later on in life when my mother passed away, you know, you know, just a few months after being diagnosed with cancer.

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But one of the things that I think a lot of people get caught up in is that it’s much easier to, to, to grieve for extended periods of time.

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I I know a person and they went through one of the most horrific things ever, but they lost a kid and years and years later, they’ve not been able to get their life together.

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You see so many people when they lose a child, they end up going through divorce. They end up giving up on their marriages.

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They walk away from it. That’s the easy route to take.

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The discipline is moving beyond the grief. Yes, you’ll never get over somebody that’s means the world to you dying, but you have to move beyond it.

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I, I think back on, on, on King David from the Bible, right.

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And I, like I said, I am a Christian. So there’s a lot of references that at times that come, come from the Bible and a lot of what, what my thinking is shaped by.

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But King David lost the son and they talked about that, how he grieved for a period of time and then he brushed himself off and moved forward.

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And so the, the easy thing is this to stay in a grieving state.

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What’s, what takes discipline is to move beyond that. And so, so many areas of our life what, what can drag us down.

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And some of the things are not even self-inflicted. Some of the things happened to us.

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And that sucks when that happens, like, like death itself.

9:00
One of the things that I find that drags me down even more so than late or is the news, you know, I, I, I love reading the news, but I find that it does affect my mood. So I have to be careful with that.

9:06
It’s easy to just keep, you know, refreshing and seeing what the latest news is. But again, that’s not controlling that.

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That’s taken away from my happiness.

9:18
So there’s other put, you could say TV.

9:18
You can say watching, you know, sports all day on TV might be enjoyable at the time, but it’s not adding to one’s happiness.

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It might help you to relax.

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But ultimately it’s taking away, when we look at it from an economic standpoint, there’s opportunity costs. These things like like, you know, just laying on the couch or not exercising, eating bad, not eating healthy foods, drinking too much alcohol, all these things, especially in excess will drag you down. It won’t add to your happiness.

9:52
Have I had some some good drinks with friends before? Absolutely.

9:57
But it’s tends to be because the fact that I don’t indulge in alcohol on a regular basis that allows those memories to be actually so well.

10:05
It’s the diminishing margin of returns. If you have one slice of pizza, that first slice of pizza is going to be amazing, But by the 10th slice of pizza, it’s not going to be that good.

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So it when when we pursue happiness, when we when we try to be disciplined in order to find happiness in life, doesn’t mean that bad times are going to come, but it can means that we stay disciplined.

10:25
We have to stay disciplined. The things that when I spend time with my wife, when I spend time with the kids and when I we go on trips together, when we do a Bible study together or just even cook dinner together, there’s a discipline in that and that I’m investing time with them to do things with them.

10:51
And that’s bringing me about happiness. So when it comes to my trading, and I told you I was going to bring this back to trading, how in the world do you do that?

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Well, you actually have to take losses in trading in order to be happy.

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Why? Because there is a discipline to trading as a significant discipline to trading.

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And you’re not going to do good in trading unless you can cut your losers short. And in order to cut the loser short, you actually have to take the losers.

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And and then doing so it can produce long term happiness because overall you’re going to be successful in your trade.

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You’re not going to let one losing trade that you never got out of because you just wanted to get back up the break even ruin your portfolio.

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So when it comes to swing trade, and I told you I was going to bring it back to trading here, happiness can be found by being a disciplined trader, but you’ll never be happy in your trade.

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You’ll never be satisfied if you’re not disciplined.

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And so I go back and I’ve been talking about this, I’ve been doing the podcast since 2017.

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I’ve been talking about these three concepts. I, I addressed it in my first 3 episodes.

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Plan to trade, manage your risk. Let the profits take care of themselves.

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We get in for the profits, but we don’t find ourselves being willing to be disciplined with number one and #2 to plan the trade and manage the risk.

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We just think that it all comes down to making exorbitant amounts of profits. And that’s not where we’re going to find that happiness in our trading.

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It’s not where we’re going to find success in our trading. When you look at people who have inherited incredible amounts of money over their life, you know

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they, I, I know this one person who who had a rich mother and she had all this money in the world and she spent her first 65 years of her life waiting for her mother to die because she knew that she would get her millions eventually did money got caught up in probate.

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They squandered all the money.

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Now why did that happen? Because there wasn’t a discipline that required them to make that money.

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You look at the the stuff that happened during the Wall Street Bets mania in 2021 and still persist even today as the markets in a bubble, there is a source of undisciplined approach.

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There’s a significant undisciplined approach when it comes to trading. People are throwing money at the market just hoping that it keeps going up.

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There’s no risk management. There’s no planning out their trade.

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It’s just give me money and give it to me quick. And that approach to trading is not going to produce the results that they think it’s going to expect.

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There was no discipline.

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There was no effort that required it. The people who are rich and that are happy, those are the ones that you often find took a lot of sacrifice, made a lot of good choices and discipline, took the, the long term rewards over the short term returns and and they made good decisions.

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But that’s not what you find today. And so the people who do I’m and there’s going to be a ton of them with, with the baby boomers

14:03
getting older, there’s going to be a whole generation. I think it’s something it’s like crazy.

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I think it’s all something like $105 trillion of wealth being passed. I don’t know if that’s right.

14:14
I’m not sure that could possibly be right 100. I want to say that’s what I’ve read anyways.

14:19
It’s trillions of dollars being passed down from I really just don’t think it could possibly be 100 trillion, but who knows.

14:28
The numbers that we talked about today is just already otherworldly to begin with. But a lot of money being passed down.

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Those people who are receiving that money more than likely are going to be extremely unhappy, especially if they didn’t have anything to begin with.

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Not because they’re they’re just going to to yellow it on something, but because it didn’t require a discipline to obtain it.

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They didn’t have to put any effort towards actually getting any of that money. And so when that money does that, those inheritances do get passed down.

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A lot of that money is just going to wind right back up into the hands of Apple and Amazon and Microsoft and and Tesla and all these car companies.

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Because people will squander the money still trying to find that happiness, thinking that that money is going to produce the happiness when it’s the discipline that produces the happiness.

15:21
Happiness is a discipline and I can’t stress that enough. Whether it’s in your trading, whether it’s in your personal life and the things that are going to bring you down, the things that are going to bring you down in your trading is not preparing, not planning to trade.

15:30
It’s easy for me to just throw money at a trade and not do any effort towards it. It really is.

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You see NVIDIA, it seems like it goes up higher and higher every day. It would be much easier for me just to throw money at NVIDIA and just hope that it goes higher instead of wait for a good trade setup.

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But there’s not a discipline to that.

15:56
And so as we’re in our swing training, we have to, if we’re really trying to find happiness in our trading, if we’re not wanting to just be completely miserable, we have to be disciplined.

16:08
We have to take the steps that are necessary in order to obtain success in the stock market. Shorter podcast than usual, but that’s this was something that I’ve been thinking about and I’m talking to my kids about it too, because they’re all getting into adulthood here and they’re having to make big choices in life.

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And I want them to think about what they’re doing, how they’re spending their time. Because how they spend their time is going to be a direct product of how in the happiness that they seek is going to be a direct outcome of how disciplined they are in their life and the choices that they make.

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Whether it’s in trading, whether it’s in relationships, whether it’s in their career, or whether it’s in their faith.

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If you enjoyed this podcast, I would thoroughly appreciate it if you could like and subscribe. If you’re listening to me on YouTube or if you’re watching me on Spotify, make sure to leave me a five star review.

16:54
I would also appreciate that immensely.

16:58
Let me know down in the comments what you know what, what do you find is the source of happiness? What where are you finding that discipline is translating into happiness into your life?

17:09
Plus, keep sending me your emails. I got a few of them that I’m already going to work with next week, but keep sending them to me nonetheless.

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I want to hear from you guys, want to hear what you have to say.

17:19
Thank you guys. God bless.

17:22
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If you have any questions, please feel free to e-mail me at ryan@shareplanner.com. All the best to you and I look forward to trading with you soon.