• A grand call to adventure. Who would not want to make a pile of money working from the comfort of your own computer screen?
• Finding a mentor. Good mentors matter! Few of us who have succeeded would have done so without some help.
• Crossing over into an “unreal” world. Markets are crazy. When we look deeply into markets, maybe we become a little crazy ourselves, and we certainly become disconnected from ordinary reality.
• Facing dire challenges. The emotional highs and lows of trading can be extreme. Is there a trader alive who hasn’t been awake at 4am wondering if they can ever do this, why they ever tried in the first place, how they could be so stupid to make the same mistakes over and over, and what they were going to do tomorrow? (This is probably not the time to mention that we only write stories about the heroes that complete the journey! A lot of dragons feasted very well, for a very long time.)
• Failure somehow, perhaps almost miraculously, is transformed to success.
• We figure out how to incorporate our trading activities into the everyday world, and discover that things probably weren’t quite as exotic or difficult as we had thought.

See? Trading is not truly about learning patterns. It is not about learning some math. It is not about skill development, and it is not even about risk management. All of these things are important, but the real work of trading is work on ourselves.