I had a meeting today that I'm still sitting with. I just hit three years at my company. I was hired for a role that flipped into something else almost the moment I started. I got promoted. Then demoted. And today, three years in, I was offered the chance to finally do the job I was originally hired to do. Same title I was promised at the start. No additional pay to match it. I thought I'd feel vindicated. Here it was, the acknowledgment, the thing I'd been working toward. Instead I felt something I wasn't ready for. I was more offended than flattered. Because in that moment I understood what the last three years had actually cost. It wasn't just hurt feelings from being passed over. It was three years of uphill battles, of being dismissed, of watching my own skills wither from disuse. And the offer, meant to feel like a win, instead showed me exactly how much morale I'd lost without noticing it go. There was nothing left to feel flattered with. Is this what it feels like to realize you've been gaslit the whole time? To be handed the thing you were promised, years late, and feel not relief but the full weight of what the waiting took from you? I don't say that to be dramatic. I say it because I think some of you are sitting in the exact same meeting, in your own company, right now. Being offered a scrap and told it's a feast. Wondering why you feel worse instead of better. Here's what I'm choosing to do with it. It has taken more resilience than I knew I had to not let this place define me. To take the thing that drained me and use it as fuel instead. To rediscover what I actually loved about finance, underneath everything the job buried. But if I'm honest, working in finance was never the real goal. It's the vehicle. The real goal, the one that's been there the whole time, is freedom. Freedom to sleep in when my body needs it, instead of jolting awake to an alarm set by someone else's calendar. Freedom to take a walk without watching the clock, without rushing back for a meeting that could have been an email.

There's a book called The Alchemist. If you haven't read it, and don't mind spoilers, here's the short version: A shepherd boy has a dream about treasure buried near the pyramids in Egypt. So he sells his sheep and crosses a desert to go find it. He gets robbed, nearly dies, falls in love, learns to read the world around him, and finally reaches the pyramids. And there he finds out the treasure was buried back home, under the exact tree where he first had the dream. He traveled across the world to find something that was sitting where he started. I think about that story a lot now, because it's mine. And it's probably similar to many of yours as well. When I started trading, I already understood basic investing concepts. I could read a chart. I 5x'd my very first portfolio to over $50K after a layoff with a nice severance. (I also lost it via a very tough lesson in stop losses - story for another time!) I went back to corporate after I thought I said goodbye forever. And after finding the courage to try trading again I discovered the skill that would eventually fund me was, in some form, already at my feet. But I didn't trust my potential, and in hindsight it was because my early profits came too easily. I didn't know at the time that beginner's luck in trading is a real thing. So I went looking for something else. I collected side hustles the way that shepherd crossed the desert in pursuit of treasure, sure the next stop would be the thing that finally unlocked my financial freedom. Each venture looked perfect on paper. Then I'd put my head down for a few months until yet another epiphany I was heading down the wrong path - whether it was the persistent fatigue, lack of inspiration or excitement after reaching a major milestone - whatever it was it just didn't feel right. After over 2 years of exploration I too learned the treasure was right there and I had kept walking past it to go look somewhere else. I was the only thing holding me back. And even when I discovered my "treasure" I needed to (and continue to) put in the work. Trading is 90% you versus you.

I want to be clear about something before I name a single book. None of these are daytrading books. Yes, 2 of them are written by investors but there's no definitive technical strategies in them, no setups, no entry models. That's exactly why they worked for me. When I started, I did what most people do - I collected strategies. I told myself the next one would be the one that finally unleashed my edge. Each one seemed great on paper and in hindsight. But when I'd log in he next morning session to look for entries I questioned every setup. Or I'd follow my rules for a week, then break them the second a trade went against me. I made just enough to keep the eval alive then I'd blow it at the finish line. Once I got fatigue seeing the same strategies over and over, missing entries that printed 80% of the time, or watching people pretend to have a strategy but really just do affiliate marketing, I realized that if it wasn't my technical capabilities holding me back it had to be something else within me. Trading is a game of you vs. you. So if I already understood market structure then it had to be my thought process holding me back. I was losing hope quickly, but something inside of me knew that success was closer than its ever been and I just had to get inspired again. My development will always be a work in progress, but these three books guided me through the mental blockages that almost made me quit. 1. The Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel This one rewired how I think about risk. Housel's whole point is that doing well with money has almost nothing to do with how smart you are and almost everything to do with how you behave. That hit me hard, because I was smart about the charts and still losing. The idea that stuck: optimism and risk-taking gets you wealthy, but frugality and paranoia keep you wealthy. I used to size up when I felt confident, which is exactly when you're most likely to be wrong. Learning to build in profit, to survive first and win second, is what kept my account alive long enough to actually get funded. You can't compound anything if the account is blown.