I’ve spent the last 20 years experiencing plenty of success and failure in my career. Most of that time has been spent self-employed (trading in the financial markets and advantage gambling for a living). At this point, my knowledge in those areas is quite vast and I’ve learned extensively about the right paths to take and pitfalls to avoid. Despite that, I have destroyed myself financially too often lately. Why?
These endeavors require many other factors to succeed, and two of the most important are opportunity and discipline. I have always struggled with the latter, but ample opportunities usually kept things going well overall for a long time. But once those dried up a good bit in recent years, my faults started to trump my strengths (and that virtually guarantees failure in these fields).
The main reasons for my work (and life) discipline issues can mostly be traced to my continuous depressive tendencies. I’m not manic or bipolar, but I am damaged enough to usually stay behind the 8-ball about keeping life in order. I also have strong addictive tendencies, and those have created quite the regular conundrums with my work.
How does this happen? I don’t always trade and gamble for the right (i.e. profitable/financially healthy) reasons. Too often, I give in to the need for a gambling “high” and take any number of self-sabotaging risks (crippling mistakes that stem from depression, unhappiness, being uneasy about life, impatience, and lately, the longing to regain my past success before it’s too late).
As you can imagine, this has created the aforementioned confusion in my last blog about my situation, especially with possible therapy. How often have you really heard of an addiction that you need to fight without stopping the underlying activity that supports you? I thought I’d found a parallel once with Overeaters Anonymous and even went to one of their meetings, but my explanation for my presence was met by those “you have three heads on your shoulder” looks.
It’s quite maddening, and I’m not sure if I’ll ever find the answers. But I’ll never stop trying to, and I’m hoping that a step of new progress was made today. I went out this afternoon with the hopes that a certain opportunity was still available at the local casino. When I got there and saw that someone else had already gotten it, the reaction was mild exasperation and (yet again) the urge to throw caution to the wind and do the wrong things. However, I was able to gather myself, spend a short time making some of the right choices there, and then leave without digging into my destructive habits.
Mind you, this was far from a new revelation overall; my pattern has always been to disruptively bounce back and forth between those right and wrong choices. BUT, this was one of the very few times that I ever felt the wrong urges, stopped, and had the willpower to change gears that day. And I’m glad to say that the thought of writing this blog was a part of finding that strength that I usually don’t.
What can I say. Hopefully it’s a start.