So April Fool's Day is today and it comes once a year April 1st And on this day we make ourselves tricksters and prank each other and have some practical jokes and we all have a little bit of a laugh. But what's really ironic and pretty sad about April Fool's Day is that many of us live our daily lives as if we're constantly in April Fools. April Fool's Day is not once a year, it's 365 days and we're the fools. And the worst part is that we never stop to say oh April Fools, It was just a joke.

No, we continue living on as if it was the truth today. My goal is to present seven ways that we've been fooling ourselves all year. and by the end of this video, hopefully both you and I can say oh April Fools, it was all just a joke. Keep in mind that I don't know all the answers.

These are all things that I struggle with, which is why I have something to say on them. Number one: We fool ourselves into thinking that small actions don't matter. We often feel that in order to make drastic change in our lives, what do we have to do? We have to wake up at 5 00 a.m We have to do 500 push-ups, run 15 miles, Your diet has to change to only chickens and plants, Lots of protein, lots of vegetables. You have to save 99 of what you earn and then all of that needs to be invested into the next Tesla.

We also think that we need to work every single hour and We have to feel bad when we're not working. We adopt this all or nothing mentality where we have to feel motivated constantly and we have to be doing these huge aggressive actions in order to get anywhere in life. We feel like we need to be on this constant sprint. and if we're not sprinting, it's not even worth jogging or yet even walking in the market instead of buying the depth slowly on high conviction plays and saving capital over time in a reasonable and sustainable way.

Oftentimes many of us can decide or at least feel like the only way forward is to yolo into one stock that is a make or break it position, maybe even using margin. We think that progress is made from bold action taken once or twice instead of consistent small actions taken many, many, many times over a long and consistent period of time. Oftentimes years, some people that are successful are built differently and they were able to do big things with one or two huge actions that just changed everything. But 99.99 of people have progress in the market and in the rest of their lives by doing small, consistent effort.

small, consistent actions never feel like they're significant in the moment, but they actually are significant over time. Doing something small doesn't need to feel significant to be significant. I took my girlfriend out to dinner for her birthday last night. Two guys from the restaurant said hey Charlie, we know who you are, we've watched your videos.

thanks for the content and thanks for the following tech picks. Okay, they didn't say that last part, but I thought on the ride home, how crazy is that? Less than four years ago, I decided to consistently start uploading videos on Youtube on a subject I was super passionate about. For me, I never really had a massive viral video that changed everything. I never made some significant bold, game-changing move.

Tons of other creators in the space grew 50 times faster than me. Most of them, actually, that you see today and you watch probably grew a lot faster than I did. I play and played my own game and I really enjoyed it. I consistently tried week after week to provide as much value as I possibly could and create content that I myself would watch in hopes that hey, some people would find value in it.

and I did that year after year. Didn't see any results really. The first 18 months and then all of a sudden in 2022, all of that action has compounded in me reaching a lot more people for me. Whether it was with school, growing up, or building capital to invest in the market or building investment accounts, or saving for my house that I live in.

Whether it was with building the channel, creating ziptraderu, or developing different relationships in my personal life, it was never any bold actions that I took. I never went out on a limb and did something huge and then I got a result from that. And the few times that I did do that, it usually didn't work out that well and the motivation died off quickly. It was always small, consistent actions which don't feel very significant in the moment, but actually are number two.

We fool ourselves into thinking that our value is focused on whether or not we win or lose. Then we get choked up in both. The problem is that winning and losing comes in seasons. We fool ourselves into thinking after a killer year in the market that we're geniuses.

We're stock market gods. We were born for this, and we're always going to be right. And then when you have a bad year in the market, we pull ourselves into thinking, hey, we're just not cut out for it. We're terrible.

We are pathetic losers. Better quit now, Susan. But your value as a participant in this world and in the market is not based on your season. Have to be able to deal with the emotions of being a Kathy Wood both in 2020 and a Kathy Wood in 2021.

You can't get super choked up on winning, nor can you get super choked up on losing. You have to treat them as both the same. If you can't focus on playing the game during a losing season, you don't deserve to play the game When you're back in a winning season, you're so focused on winning, you won't be prepared to handle the next an inevitable losing season. I'm certainly not a poet, and I'm not really a poetry guy, but there is this famous poem from Rudyard Kipling that has a line that says, if you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same.

Basically what that means to me is, hey, if you want to be a good participant in a market or in the world, you can't get choked up with triumph nor disaster. Much easier said than done right. But a triumph does not make you permanently triumphant, and a disaster does not make you permanently a victim. I tread lightly with this.

Of course. everything is relative and there's lots of different life situations. I don't mean to generalize, but when you're in your own game, why do we have to identify with triumph and defeat so heavily and in the market? Why is it that we define ourselves with the season that the market is? In the last three weeks, we've seen a huge rise in a lot of stocks in the broader market and growth. And Meme stocks.

Meme. Revenge stocks. People are excited again, but we must treat both good and bad times as imposters. They're both the same.

There's no good or bad. There's commitment to the process. Number three, This one is very important. We fool ourselves into thinking we have control over everything in the market.

And in life, there's a lot of things that you just don't have control over in the market that could be the fed, the actions of Ceos of companies that you like, the broader economy, the government. In life, we don't have control over where we were born. We don't have control over who our parents are. We don't have control over health problems.

A lot of health problems. At least that could hit us. We don't have control over whether we get hit by a truck, and because of that, we have to have a certain amount of true humility over what is happening to us because we don't have complete control over our environment. But at the same time, and much more importantly, number four: we can't fool ourselves into thinking that we have control over nothing.

We fool ourselves into thinking that just because we don't control everything that we must be helpless. That's a huge mistake, and that's a mentality that can cause us to make some extremely toxic decisions and just throw in the towel. In reality, 100, we do not have control over everything that comes our way. but we do still have the ability to make the best decision given any any situation that we are handed.

There's very few situations where choosing to work hard isn't going to improve your outcome. Life is so unfair though, and there are so many different starting points. If you're born healthy and to a very wealthy, connected family like say, the Trump kids or the Obama kids, obviously, you're going to have a huge edge over 99.99 of the population. Putting an effort at that stage is going to yield much higher results than that same amount of effort at a much lower stage.

That's just a fact. And alternatively, if you're handed a hardship, you may have to work so much harder for the very same things that you and I even take for granted every day. Many of you know that my mom passed away from cancer That happened back in 2011. she was diagnosed with cancer about five years earlier than that, and very, very quickly it became late stage.

The outlook wasn't good, and no one thought that she'd make it all those years that she did. You probably also know somebody or have a loved one that suffered through cancer. The treatments are horrendous. the whole process is terrible, but another thing that really eats you up is the uncertainty of whether you're going to be around in the next month or in the next year.

When you're in that kind of situation, you have very few options, very few variables, you're given very little to work with, and it's very painful. My mom was certainly a victim of a very, very brutal disease, but what was very important and what really had a huge impact on me today is that she never acted like a victim. She did everything she could do to maximize what she did: control, listening to different doctors' opinions, hearing different strategies, making as informed of a decision as she possibly could, meanwhile doing her best to take care of herself. So many people that are diagnosed with cancer have such aggressive cancer that they don't even have that opportunity just to be clear.

But in her case, she had serious cancer. but she had some options to actually prolong her life. She could have definitely said, screw this. I'm going to let nature take its course.

throw in the towel 100 what I would do. I wouldn't want to go through that, but in my view, she used what was given to her, her variables given to her, her situation to the best of her ability. If she'd used that kind of effort and struggle and had also been given a healthy body, I have no doubt she could have easily created a Fortune 500 company or saved Africa, or done something impacting on the global scale, but she simply wasn't. Given that kind of situation, a lot of us are given situations that our effort doesn't mean as much in terms of extrinsic results.

Sometimes we just have to do a lot of effort just to get to where everybody else is her reward. Something that we all take for granted is being able to live five years, Five times as many years as she might have otherwise been able to. Certainly didn't control everything, but she maximized what she did. And if she didn't live those five years after diagnosis, I probably would have never gotten the chance to know her in any meaningful way because I was too young and I don't mean this to make anybody sad.

This happened a long time ago. Lots of you have gone through similar situations or will go through it. unfortunately. hopefully one day we can cure this.

But the point is that no matter what the situation you should aim, always aim to make the best of your variables. And if you do that, that is what successes. I believe that self satisfaction and success comes from knowing that you did the best in the variables that you were given and you accepted things that weren't in your control. It's easy for me to talk about this as somebody who's young and healthy and in an extremely successful country where there's literally opportunities everywhere.

But at the end of the day, I think that this is something that everybody should aim for, and it's something that I really tried to implement because of the example that my mother set for me number five. This is a bit of a lighter note, thankfully. Um, but we fool ourselves into overvaluing criticism and others' opinions. Now in the finance community over the last year, you can kind of see how criticism has hurt the mental space of a lot of creators.

It's affected the type of content they put out whether they even post anymore, as well as sometimes even their decisions on whether to buy or sell stocks. Criticism can be very toxic if taken the wrong way. But this is not just a Youtuber problem. This is something that we deal with in all of our lives.

You get criticism from family members, from your bosses, from your employees, from your friends, from your neighbor Susan. People may not believe in the direction that you're trying to go. They may think you're a little bit kooky, and that's not even the worst of it. The most harsh criticism is from yourself.

To me, there's nothing anybody can say to me that's worse than what I've already said to myself at certain points. Oh, you're lazy. Oh, you're not doing your best. Oh, you're a dumb dog.

Woof. That person over there is much better than you. Why aren't you like that person? You can like yourself, have good self-esteem and be confident, but still have that voice of a hater in the back of your head coming from a different part of your brain. And I know that it's popular for people on social media to call critics haters.

But that's not true. There's no such thing as a hater that's external. We decide which criticism we take in and feel we are our own biggest haters. Now, don't get me wrong here, there's certainly a amount of constructive criticism out there.

You need to be able to live in a world where you get that criticism and can implement it when necessary. But at a certain point, you can't live in the land of critics. If you're playing your own game, let other people play their game and respect them and help them if they need it. But at the end of the day, if you're playing your own game, you can't live in a game dictated by the likes of other people.

Number six, this is a big one. We for ourselves into playing defense instead of offense. We think that not losing is more important than winning. We want to protect ourselves from the risk of ego bruising or setbacks, not wanting to ask a person out because you're worried about being rejected, not wanting to go for that new promotion, or start that new business, Because what will people think if I fail? what will I think about myself if I fail in the stock market? That might be not allowing yourself to buy a stock specifically because the crowd thinks it's trash, because the analysts think it's trash Because oh, the stock price went down.

That means it's a bad company and all these situations. What do you do when you're saying oh, I would rather play a strong defense and just keep the ego that I have instead of go out and try to build something instead of playing offense. God forbid I try to build something in my life. And whenever you play an offensive game, there are real risks.

People could criticize you. You could fail, you could lose money, you could get rejected. But boohoo, that's life. And by the way, some of us fool ourselves into thinking that we're playing offense.

but in reality we're just perfectionists who are playing a perfectionist offense game. We can't get into the market because things aren't perfect. Can't talk to that person because things aren't perfect. We can't start that business because the economy is not perfect.

News flash: things are never going to be perfect. Ever. If your offense is dependent on things being perfect, you're going to be waiting forever. So that is really just defense now.

Lastly, and this is a concept that is really fresh in my mind and it may even sound contradictory in some sense to other points in this video. But so is life number seven. We fool ourselves into thinking we'd feel any different if we had everything we've ever wanted. Now again, I tread lightly with this because not all situations are the same and I don't like to generalize if you're living in war-torn Ukraine, if you're living on the streets, if you are dealing with cancer or something like it, there's a baseline of satisfaction that you're going to feel a lot better at if you return to.

But if you're like me, who is relatively healthy, isn't in any real danger when you already have basic survival down, what are you really focusing on? You're focusing on extras. that extra raise, that extra client, that new girlfriend or boyfriend, that new house, that overpriced electric car from a quirky South African man chasing recognition or this or that. Maybe you even have kids. But you're not happy enough with your kids because you aren't going to be satisfied until they're better than all the other kids.

My point with this is not saying that achievement and trying to chase down your goals aggressively isn't important. In fact, like I said earlier, I think it's paramount that people use their variables that they're handed the life situation that they're handed to do as best as possible, and the goals that they've defined for themselves. But on that journey, folks, it's just as important not to fool ourselves into thinking we'd feel anything different if we got everything that we wanted. Achievement gives you a short-term dopamine hit.

It makes you feel good in the moment. Unlike inflation, The rewards of an aggressive journey of achievement is transitory. I enjoy cake. When I eat cake, I feel good.

But I don't build my life on cake. but I have made the mistake of building my life on trying to achieve things that are just as transitory as cake. But what is not transitory is building a character and a lifestyle for yourself where you are focused 100 on spending your time in challenges and projects that you actually care about that you believe are worthwhile. And if you think about it that way, no matter what level of success you achieve or don't achieve, you're still winning at the end of the day.

It's our path, the meaning that we can create on that path, and the meaning that we can create for other people on that path that dictates our satisfaction. Some of us walk much prettier paths than others, let me tell you that. but that doesn't mean that we can't make the most of the path that we're given with some mindfulness. I really believe that each of us can make April Fool's Day just one day a year instead of a regular occurrence.

have a good weekend.