How different it is on the ground

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Years ago I decided to enter the stock market. I read a lot about it, and decided that this was the thing for me. For a few years I worked on different strategies involving research & programming. Then I entered the market. Almost two years later, there was no success yet.

Unlike many others, I tested my strategies against real historic data, but still, no cigar. It does seem strange though. What other business venture would not give you any profit after 5 years?

 Well, as it turns out, I’m one of the lucky ones. At least I didn’t lose a small fortune like most day traders do. Various studies show that between two thirds and three quarters of day traders lose their money. A very small percentage makes a profit. Often those few accounts that make profit are from one or two lucky deals. In theory your theory works, but in practice with real money, when it comes to brass tacks, it’s another ball game.

Behind every successful rock band, there’s a hundred bands gigging in smoked out night clubs for a few dollars hoping to be discovered. Behind every one of those bands, there’s a crowd of musicians and buskers, just trying to get regular gigs. Only when you try yourself,  do you discover how difficult it really is. Its difficult to keep a band together, looking for gigs, building a following, getting recognized..

Yet, dozens of people keep telling the young musician that he should just ‘ find gigs’ and ‘it’s easy!’ The average person thinks that it’s just a matter of time, before a good musician would be discovered and become famous.
 

When a scrawny young guy who wants to build muscles, starts asking people how to do it, almost 100% of people have the idea that bodybuilders simply lift weights and eat more protein, and magically end up looking like this.

 Its also just a matter of time, they say. Some people even have the idea that all you need to do is to lift weights regularly – nothing else. There’s always this story of this friend of a friend of a cousin, who started doing manual labor, and after a few weeks had bulging muscles!

Its natural, just lift weights and the muscles magically grow.

But in reality, this is the picture that was painted by the bodybuilding industry over the years. Since the 1960s, people started seeing images of these bodybuilders in the media, from Larry Scott, to Steve Reeves to Arnold…there’s always images of them posing, and then images of them training – that’s all. So, naturally people assume that that is all there is to it.

By now  it’s common knowledge that the bodybuilding industry was driven by steroids since the 1960s and even before that. Anabolic steroids have been around since as early as the 1930s, but more commonly used by bodybuilders since the 1960s.

But even steroids, being an important factor, is still not ‘it’. Most bodybuilders lives revolve around their meals, and their strange way of eating and living, that isolates them from the regular community. It’s a huge sacrifice.

I wrote an article about the Mercator map, that’s been used by the educational system since 1598, and how this distorted map has been used ever since to intimidate the Southern hemisphere, the ´third world ‘countries. Firstly, it puts Europe and North America on top, and Africa and Asia at the bottom. Secondly it renders the richer countries to look much larger than they actually are.

Gurdjieff used to say that Asia is much bigger than people realize. He said that the people in the West don’t comprehend just how large Asia is. I didn’t understand this statement, because I was comparing the USA with Asia on the map. But its true, if you look at the Gall-Peters projection that was made in 1974. We know now that this is so.

Gurdjieff must have travelled a lot, and on land to have realized this. He didn’t have access to the Gall-Peters map. 

Only by being on the ground, travelling on the ground, would you realize such a thing. These days we travel by plane, and in that way you would never realize how distorted the common world map is.

Things look different on the ground. Only once you attempt to put your idea to practice, do you realize this and only once you walk the walk, do you get it.