I had to pause for a moment to think about this. I agree that many of the typical reasons people are motivated to trade-the action, euphoria, desire to be a hero, the attention one can draw to himself by winning, or the self-pity that comes from losing-create problems that will ultimately detract from a traders performance and overall success. But the true underlying attraction to trading is far more fundamental and universal. Trading is an activity that offers the individual unlimited freedom of creative expression, a freedom of expression that has been denied most of us for most of our lives. Of course, the editor asked me what I meant by this. I explained that in the trading environment, we make almost all of the rules. This means there are very few restrictions or boundaries on how we can choose to express ourselves. Of course there are some formalities such as having to become a member of an exchange to be a floor trader, or meeting the minimum financial requirements to open a brokerage account if you're an off-the-floor trader. But otherwise, once you are in a position to start trading, the possibilities that exist for how you go about doing it are virtually limitless.

I went on to give him an example from a seminar I attended several years ago. Someone had calculated that, if you combined bond futures, bond options, and the cash bond markets, there would be over eight billion possible spread combinations. Now add the timing considerations based on how you read the revailing market conditions, and the various ways to trade become virtually limitless. The editor paused for a moment and asked, "But why would having access to such an unrestricted environment result in fairly consistent failure?" I answered, "Because unlimited possibilities coupled with the unlimited freedom to take advantage of those possibilities present the individual with unique and specialized psychological challenges, challenges that very few people are properly equipped to deal

with, or have any awareness of for that matter, and people can't exactly work on overcoming something if they don't even know its a problem."

The freedom is great. All of us seem to naturally want it, strive for it, even crave it. But that doesn't ean that we have the appropriate psychological resources to operate effectively in an environment that has few, if any, boundaries and where the potential to do enormous damage to ourselves exists. Almost everyone needs to make some mental adjustments, regardless of their educational background, intelligence or how successful they've been in other endeavors.

The kind of adjustments I'm talking about have to do with creating an internal mental structure that provides the trader with the greatest degree of balance between the freedom to do anything and the potential that exists to experience both the financial and psychological damage that can be a direct result of that freedom.

Creating a mental structure can be difficult enough, especially if what you want to instill is in conflict with what you already believe. But for those of us who want to be traders, the difficulty of creating the appropriate structure is invariably compounded by a backlog of mental resistance that starts developing at the very earliest stages of our lives.

of us are born into some sort of social environment. A social environment (or society), whether it's a family, city, state, or country, implies the existence of structure. Social structures consist of rules, restrictions, boundaries, and a set of beliefs that become a code of behavior that limits the ways in which individuals within that social structure can or cannot express themselves. Furthermore, most of the limitations of social structure were established before we are born. In other words, by the time any of us get here, most of the social structure governing our individual expression is in place and well entrenched. It's easy to see why a society's need for structure and the individual's need for selfexpression can conflict. Every person who wants to master the art of trading faces just such a fundamental conflict. I'd like you to ask yourself what one characteristic (a form of personal expression) is common to every child born on this planet, regardless of the location, culture, or social situation the child is born into. The answer is curiosity. Every child is curious. Every child is eager to learn. They can be described as little learning machines.

Consider the nature of curiosity. At its most fundamental level, it is a force. More specifically, it is an inner-directed force, which means there's no necessity to motivate a child to learn something. Left on their own, children will naturally explore their surroundings. What is more, this inner-directed force also seems to have its own agenda; in other words, even though all children are curious, not all children are naturally curious about the same things. There's something inside each of us that directs our awareness.

Even infants seem to know what they want and don't want. When adults encounter this unique display of individuality expressed by an infant, they're usually surprised. They assume that infants have nothing inside of them that makes them uniquely who they are. How else would infants express their individuality than by what in their environment attracts or repels them? I call this inner-directed guidance the force of natural attractions.

Natural attractions are simply those things about which we feel a natural or passionate interest. Ours is a big and diverse world, and it offers each of us a great deal to learn about and experience. But that doesn't mean each of us has a natural or passionate interest in learning about or experiencing all there is. There's some internal mechanism that makes us "naturally selective."

If you think about it, I'm sure you could list many things to do or be that you have absolutely no interest in. I know I could. You could also make another list of the things you are only marginally interested in. Finally, you could list everything you have a passionate interest in. Of course, the lists get smaller as the interest levels rise. Where does passionate interest come from? My personal view is that it comes from the deepest level of our being-at the level of our true identity. It comes from the part of us that exists beyond the characteristics and personality traits we acquire as a result of our social upbringing.