Prepare for Trading Series #1 - Motivation

MOTIVATION
Trading for any decent period of time is hard, really hard.
If you want to trade to make a difference in your and your loved ones lives it is critically important to prepare for this hardship.
An excellent point to start is to think about your motivation to trade. You would also like to keep that motivation going for a long period of time, seeing that trading is not only hard but also potentially very lucrative over time.
To be clear, we aren’t currently concerned with goals and “how to succeed” at trading forex. Trading goals and implementing processes to achieve those goals aren’t motivation. That follows on being motivated to trade. There are different ‘levels’ of trading motivation. It is really important to know where you pitch up long before you begin to look for “trading systems”, “brokers one can trust” and “low spreads and high leverage”.
So the million dollar question remains: WHY TRADING?
Your answer will be unique.
I think there might be some value in my unique story. Allow me to share it in short.
Late in April 1998 I found myself sitting in a conference room of the small company I was a founding member and owner-manager of at that stage.
We had some issues.
With me were one of the other founding members and some people I knew very well who were in a process to buy me out. Although I didn’t know it until one had asked the question: “why don’t you take our offer of XYZ rand”? Imagine my surprise! I had no idea there had been an offer I should be aware of.
To make a long story short. I took about a day to decide to “cut my losses” and go with their surprising offer. It was an outcome for a bad situation I found myself in and I could close a book and look ahead, do something else. Like trading stocks online. (You may remember that 1998 was the early days of the online trading