1% inspiration, 99% perspiration - one of the many old truths about success.

Today, even if the informational revolution accelerates and amplifies our lives we prefer carrying daily  to work the same old asphyxiated “mental-setting”,  fraught with misfit morals and a colorless and tiring educational background.

We have to work hard. (!?) - Hard, supersaturated and badly.

To embrace the concept of  "hard work" means to annihilate concepts such as "option" and "efficiency."

By analogy, in trading success means profitability, and the biggest enemy of profitability is the excess. Excess of enthusiasm, excess of transactions, excess of indicators, excess in monitoring and rethinking transactions - excess of work.
One of the main shortcomings beginners face is being too zealous, either because they are greedy either because they are gamblers, rushing for immediate rewards. They trade intensively, excessively using indicators that often do not help but confuse them, constantly monitor the graphics and expose themselves to the emotional factor.

They work hard but they do not work efficiently > they are trading a lot, blocking a lot of capital, risking a lot, losing a lot.
If you’ve smashed your account, it will not matter that you've monitored 24/24 the 15 transactions you placed using n + 1 complex graphical tools.

XXI century’s proverbial for traders: Less is more.

A profitable trading style, beyond knowing the tools, intelligence, strategy and effort, involves hunting the opportunity. Waiting, this art of  "doind nothing", with which the world's big investors are flirting with, is an exercise of sharpening the senses ( of perception on market mechanisms), the  patience, and of an incubation period - in psychological terms - of the best idea for given circumstances.

More often than not, the term allocated to plan an idea should be  three times longer than its execution.

The key to survival in the market is patience - patience both when entering a transaction and during its course. Hunting immediate short profits exhausts our vital resources: time, energy and capital. They can be effectively targeted and focused on a more consistent "prey".

Our insistence on this hunting terminology is due to the strong fascination I have recently experienced watching a documentary about saltwater crocodiles. What makes these dinosaur contemporaries the winners of 200 million years of struggle for survival are the patience, adaptability and tenacity with which they study their prey and wait for the opportunity to enjoy it without any risk.

Profitable trading follows the same pattern: knowing the market mechanisms, carefully designing a strategy, and waiting for the right moment to capitalize on it.

The caracterological dominants of these survivors, genetically rooted from the Triassic, are not questioned by emotions.
The way emotions - as a driving force of our mental setting - are  managed and externalized, may explain Van Tharp's statement that: trading is 100% psychology.

More than the announced news or concrete market conditions, what truly influences price developments is the anticipated reaction of traders to them or the desperate decisions they make to compensate for losses in forward transactions.

And again comes the answer ... patience, patience, patience.
How theory is simple, but practice kills us, here is how we can manage the impulses to intervene in the market inappropriately.

First of all, we must understand that "every emotion has its distinct repertoire of thought, reaction and memory" (Daniel Goleman - Emotional Intelligence). 
Our reaction to a particular situation is the average of the reactions we have had in the past in similar circumstances. 
Through the power of rehearsal we can sediment more suitable patterns for our trading account’s wellness. Obviously, this involves an effort that will gradually diminish to annihilation.

Without spraying capital and energy today over many small transactions and without rethinking a decision, we will strengthen our immunity to the stress of tomorrow.

And here's how, patiently, we can get profitable with 99% inspiration and just 1% perspiration.

Best wishes!