“Years of experience eventually teach you that your main battle, always, is with yourself — your propensity for errors, for rationalizing marginal hands into good hands, lack of concentration, misreading other players, emotional eruptions, impatience, and so on. Your opponents are merely dim outlines that come and go. Few of them ever reach the exalted heights of damage that you can inflict on yourself.”
– Larry Phillips, Zen and the Art of Poker
Many great traders have expressed some version of the opinion, “Your greatest opponent is yourself.” Do you agree?
If so, what are the implications?
On the positive side, if “we have met the enemy and he is us,” as Pogo once said, what does that say about growth opportunity?
If you had perfect discipline, perfect motivation, and perfect emotional control, how good (or great) a trader could you be?