“Look at a tightrope walker. He is evidently and completely concentrated, because if he were not, he would fall to the ground. His life is at stake, and it is only perfect concentration which can save him. Yet do you believe that his thought and his imagination are occupied with what he is doing? Do you think that he reflects and that he imagines, that he calculates and that he makes plans with regard to every step which he makes on the rope?
“If he were to do that, he would fall immediately. He has to eliminate all activity of the intellect and of the imagination in order to avoid a fall. He must have suppressed the ‘oscillations of the mental substance’ in order to be able to exercise his skill.”
(from Meditations on the Tarot, by Anonymous)
Anonymous calls it concentration without effort, and I tend to think of it as unconscious mastery. Either way, the idea is that true mastery of a skill is something beyond conscious reasoning upon the topic. In fact, thinking too much about what you are doing can get in the way of actually doing it. The difference between understanding something and knowing it is more than just semantics. This is why you can’t just read a book or a forum thread and suddenly know how to trade. This is why it’s hard for true masters of a skill to explain exactly what they do. The list goes on and on, and I’m sure everyone can think of examples from all walks of life related to this simple truth.
I agree. Like other martial arts that require that level of skill, the markets’ dynamics can be safely negotiated through a natural way of fixing the load ‘as you go’. But jazzing up this performance can only be done after long hours of listening (watching) and practicing. Dying many deaths-losses in SIM and of course sometimes in our real money accounts. Fear must be absent and this fearlessness cannot be achieved without the knowing of many outcomes in any constellated (Jung used this word often) set of signals (indicators:-). Reading a forum or a book does help though, as it shows at the way in which others may approach trading; or living (That is the reason good Literature —the one with believable consequences— may redeem you before committing your will on flesh into the wrong path…). To stay with the TAROT analogy I must say you remind me of whom this card alludes of: The Magician (we need you, Richard there at the table, cooking up spells-indicators-lanterns:-) for us Fools to internalize at a glance that which you have concentrated through your work. We can then walk carelessly, like Fools in a summer day.
Let´s not forget though that the right tool in the wrong hands will still be useless or even dangerous; just like a poor entry can still yield profit when managed with ART.
Thanks so much for the thoughtful reply, Claudio!