Recently, I was thinking about the subject I am writing about here, and I was thinking along these lines: To successfully invest or speculate, you must understand where you went wrong if you failed, and do your best not to repeat the same mistakes. Even better, to succeed, you must purely do what works at the right time, in the right way. I, personally think that is the hardest thing about any investment of any sort.

Genuine success of any sort depends on knowing every inch of failure and how not to do it again if you did it when you attempted to achieve success. If you can understand that statement, you can genuinely get somewhere. If you depend on initial luck and the “luck of the draw” in success, you really will get nowhere. In short, reality is understanding fully how to fail and not doing it, and instead doing what makes for genuine success. After all, people judge you for real successes, not the many temporary misunderstandings and failures that led to that ultimate real success.

In that sense, “We all love to win, but who loves to train?” takes on a brand old meaning. Failure, properly used is the ultimate stepping stone to genuine success, especially in investing, futures, and that type of thing and beyond.

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 genuine success in investing, playing poker or anything requiring cognitive understanding of when to act, when not to act, when to pull back and when to go forward. In brief, there are many ways to lose, but only one genuine way to win ultimately after understanding all those ways to lose: You work through to success. You do not depend on luck, you do not worship the first time making it through “luckily”, success comes through that trial and error understanding work. For those that think I am a pessimist and not the ultimate optimist in understanding the nature of all games requiring investment and future commodities of every sort in a genuine ultimate capitalist way, there is always the Bernard “Bernie” Madoff way of faking it until you genuinely fail, or doing what it takes to really succeed (like the ultimate genuine capitalist I am), which I genuinely prefer. Doing what it takes really, consists of not so much skill, but understanding how to succeed by finding every way to fail until success is certain. Why do you think Jason “Jay” Gould died a failure technically, and Abraham Lincoln is remembered as one of our greatest Presidents of the United States, because in his life, he found every way to fail until he did succeed while Gould, though successful in business most of his life cut corners at crucial moments instead of failing smartly. I get it. Gould died of a heart attack from the stress of maintenance, Lincoln had to be taken out by an assassin of the January 6th, 2021 sort that wanted attention in a sorry way. I get it: Win the right way, or else suffer a fate “getting away with it” gives you in the mirror if nobody else immediately knows what you lied about or attempted cheating at.