The four circles of progress — a psychological map for someone new to trading

Core idea

Anyone who goes from zero to getting real results has to pass through four concentric circles: comfort → fear → the lesson → success. The feeling of confusion, fear, and low confidence isn't a sign you're not cut out for this, it's proof you're in the second circle — meaning you're moving up. Anything you understand the instant you learn it, anything you master the instant you try it, only keeps you stuck in place.

Details

Circle 1 — The COMFORT circle (innermost)

This is your entire current stock of habits, knowledge, experience, and environment. Here you feel safe because you're in control of everything, and you can pull it out and use it without having to think.

The test question: if your current circle is already giving you the life and the financial level you want, there's nothing to discuss. If it isn't, you're required to step out of it.

Circle 2 — The FEAR circle

Stepping out of your old specialty, into a body of knowledge you've never used. The teacher's metaphor: put someone who isn't a doctor in front of an open-heart surgery — the feeling of low confidence and fear blanketing you is only natural, even when you already know the theory but don't yet have the experience.

Two barriers you're guaranteed to hit:

1. The volume of new knowledge. Just loading it into your head is hard enough; once loaded, you still have to master it and use it against the market every day.
2. The pressure of comparison. Someone who started learning the same day as you already has results → it breeds impatience, wanting to skip stages.

The signature symptom of circle 2 — MAKING EXCUSES. Because you don't understand it yet, haven't used it effectively yet, your head produces all kinds of reasons: "this system probably isn't any good, a good system should pay off the moment you finish learning it." The teacher's blunt counter: if a system like that existed anywhere in the world, people would pay a billion dollars for it.

The consequence of excuse-making — CHISELING A PLOW IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD [changing course mid-stream]. Use this system for 2 months without mastering it, decide it isn't working → jump to Ichimoku for 2 months → jump to Wyckoff → jump to Price Action → never actually get anywhere.

Why other people move faster than you (an explanation to shed the pressure of comparison):

• They already had market experience before, and now they've added the correct method on top → results come immediately.
• Or they simply spend more time: you do 2 hours a day, they do 4–8 hours a day. That's just the rule, and no one can skip it.
• How to compensate when the market is slow: backtest past charts to build your own experience instead of sitting around waiting for the market.

Circle 3 — The LESSON circle

You've gotten past fear and excuse-making. There's still difficulty — challenges from the shape of the market, from trading psychology, from tactics that aren't yet a good fit — but the fundamental difference is: you know where the difficulty comes from and what needs fixing. No more confusion, no more being swayed by outside opinions.

In this circle you're picking up new knowledge, new experience, new skills — and the comfort circle starts to expand outward.

Circle 4 — The SUCCESS / ELITE circle

In control of everything, having mastered both the knowledge and the skills, with the experience to fight the market.

The most important point of this model: circle 4 then becomes circle 1 of a bigger cycle. Once you're comfortable in this field, it sits neatly inside a larger fear–lesson–success circle. The circles keep expanding forever.

The mechanism behind it: do it enough and the knowledge sinks into you

A student asked why the teacher can answer every question without needing to think. His answer: it's not a speaking skill — it's that when you do a thing enough times, whatever you touch it just pours out. Like driving: at first you have to think about where the clutch and the brake are; do it enough and you drive home from work completely unconsciously.

The rule of "watch each video no fewer than 3 times"

Across every cohort, the people who were complete beginners and still got good results all shared exactly one thing in common: rewatching every lecture video no fewer than 3 times, some people 5–6 times.

Why:

• 1st time — watched from a newcomer's perspective, with no market experience yet → absorbing ~30% is doing well; you don't even know what this part is for.
• 2nd time — after some real experience, rewatching it sinks in another ~30%: "oh, this applies to a phase like that." Usually the result at this point is no more losses, not yet a lot of profit.
• 3rd time onward — knowledge combines with experience → full understanding → the market starts paying out its fair wage.

Everyone who rewatches it lets out the same line: "why didn't I catch this back then?" The practical conclusion: when the market is dull and everything looks confusing, that's exactly when you should be reviewing, not when you should be sitting there forcing yourself to find a trade.

"Zero or Hero" — why this job demands you review down to the last detail

In most professions, going from 0 → 10, whatever level of skill you have, you get paid for it: even at level 1–2 you still get some proportional result. Trading does not follow that rule — across the 0 → 10 stretch, the result is almost "either Zero or Hero": just get one step slightly wrong (even while at level 9) and the result can turn bad immediately. This is a job that demands perfectionism at every single step of action. The practical consequence: you can't learn it half-heartedly, you have to review it down to the last detail for the knowledge to turn into a usable skill — but in return, the payoff at the end is far bigger than in other professions.

The review method the teacher gave in one session (adding to the "rewatch ≥3 times" rule above): review starting from the opening session onward, one session every 1–2 days, treat it like "burning the old notebook" and take notes all over again as if you were a new student. This is an exam with yourself to decide whether you move up a level or stay behind; a dull market phase is exactly the time to do this (study hard, train hard), not the time to force yourself to find a trade.

The five powers applied to this model

For the details of the five powers see the 4 psychological stages. Two points the teacher adds in this session when combining the five powers with the four circles:

• Power of diligence — only by doing does knowledge and wisdom emerge; sitting and studying theory alone never makes you good. This is the only thing that can punch through circle 2.
• Power of mindfulness — the thing to remind yourself of is: difficulty, hardship, confusion are entirely normal, and it's exactly those things that pull your life upward; the things that feel comfortable are what pull you down.

Persistence ≠ blind determination

The teacher draws a clear line here and says you should use the word persistence:

• Persistence = you already know the result will come, you just have to put in the effort and time.
• Blind determination = you don't know if the result will come or not, but you charge ahead anyway.

In this course, the result has already been proven by people who went before ⇒ all that's left is persistence.

The uphill cycling metaphor

Riding uphill always feels heavy. That feeling of heaviness is exactly the proof you're going up. If it feels effortless, you're almost certainly moving sideways or downhill.

Don't know where to start? → start with a HEALTH goal

Young people often ask, "I want to succeed but I don't know where to start." The teacher's constant answer: start with a health goal — because:

• It requires little knowledge, mostly willpower + discipline. Three pillars: routine (sleeping/waking on schedule), exercise, nutrition. The hard part isn't knowing what to do, it's doing it consistently every day — sitting at a table with roast chicken in front of you and still eating your own plate of salad is exactly what discipline looks like.
• A good habit drags along other good habits (and the reverse: one bad habit drags along a whole bad chain). Set a quantified 1-year goal (weight, body-fat %, muscle %) → forces you into a framework → builds the foundation of willpower–persistence–discipline needed to succeed in any field, trading included.
• A warning from successful people in their 40s–45s: almost everyone regrets "if only I'd balanced my health better back then." Sitting on a mountain of money without health is meaningless.

A daily quiet moment of reflection (a form of meditation)

Great investors (Warren Buffett, Bill Gates…) all set aside time in the day to think. The teacher uses the "Mindfulness/Reflect" app (the Mindfulness app on Apple Watch, the Reflect section) for ~5 minutes: the app gives a guiding prompt (e.g. "think about the last time you created something…") and you sit and reflect. Without an app, write out a few questions in advance to reflect on during any break. Effect: creates a pause in your head, trains focus and the ability to think deeply — exactly what trading needs.

The "discomfort → act now" switch

This is the most concrete tool for moving from circle 1 to circle 2, because it attacks the excuse-making mechanism head-on:

"Whenever I feel discomfort at having to do something, I won't think about it — I'll get up and do it right away."

• This line has to be written over and over until it becomes reflex. That feeling of discomfort used to be an excuse to procrastinate; now its role is flipped into a trigger for action.
• A working example: you planned to work out at 7am, and your brain says "too tired, do it this afternoon / tomorrow" — that's exactly when the switch has to flip on. Discomfort appears → push the thought aside → go work out.
• The brain's two-way mechanism: TikTok/scrolling your phone gives you dopamine first, regret later. Completing something hard means the reward (endorphin/dopamine) comes after you've already gotten past the discomfort. What you need to train is getting addicted to the feeling of completion, instead of addicted to instant reward.
• Success comes from repeating something boring, not from one big thing. The teacher cites what he thinks is Jim Rohn's idea (subtitle transcription unclear on the name, almost certainly Jim Rohn — cross-check if you need to quote it): the list of things that actually matter isn't more than half a dozen items — those are the things you do over and over every day. Once you've committed to it, you finish it: get home at 11pm and you haven't run that day yet, you still put your shoes on and go run.

A consequence about loneliness: trading is a 100% independent job, you can't do it as two people (it creates psychological conflict). In the early stage you have to get used to being judged by family/neighbors. The teacher says plainly that's just a law of the game, not a jab: once results come, that loneliness fades on its own. How to live with it: become friends with yourself — see pen-paper-candle.

A realistic timeframe: ~1 YEAR, split into two halves

The teacher gives a concrete deadline to block both diseases — impatience and drifting without direction:

• The first 6 months (~60 sessions): understand → remember → apply, and get corrected. This is the phase where you still have someone to point out your mistakes.
• The next 6 months — trading independently: this is where the real leap in progress happens, because you have to analyze your own trades, evaluate your own trades, examine your own psychology yourself.
• Around 1 year total to reach a state of steady profit. Not one month, and not five years either.

Along with two mandatory conditions, without which the deadline means nothing:

1. Just rewatching videos without trading (demo or small capital) gives you zero experience — watch it a 10th time and you'll understand it exactly the same as the 1st time. You need real trades, both right and wrong ones, and then reviewing the material makes it click. This is an important addition to the "rewatch videos ≥3 times" rule above: rewatch + have trades to check against, not just rewatching for its own sake.
2. A lesson only becomes truly yours once you're ready to learn it. Get stopped out from rushing and don't write it up, and next time, with that same character trait, you'll do exactly the same thing (note-taking on trades).

A perspective for self-management: treat trading as a one-person company — every morning before sitting down at your desk, re-align yourself with that company's internal rules: knowledge rules, discipline rules, psychology rules. There's no one left to supervise you anymore (SMART goals in trading).

Three words that kill progress: "I ALREADY KNOW THIS"

Almost 100% of people join to learn right after they've just lost money. Meaning the entire stock of knowledge, mindset, and habits they bring with them is the experience of failure — the exact thing that produced their current result.

The teacher's metaphor (verbatim, subtitle spelling corrected): "take your cup of water, empty it out for me, don't bring it in here" — a cup already full of murky water can't receive clean water poured in, it just makes things murkier and adds to the failure. Anyone who's already succeeded with the old method has no business coming here to learn.

A very simple self-check: the moment the thought "I already know this" flashes in your head, that's the moment learning stops. You have to learn like a child to actually absorb it.

Alongside this is a lasting class rule: newcomers are banned from advising each other on knowledge/theory. You might not even be right yourself; give bad advice and one person with the wrong understanding becomes n people with the wrong understanding. The more basic the question, the more you should ask the instructor directly — "asking a dumb question" is the right term for the early stage of stepping into a field, because the surer your fundamentals, the more solid the logic built on top of them.

Two barriers of the early stage (a sharper version, 2023 cohort)

1. The sheer volume of knowledge + the work of turning knowledge into skill. A 2-hour session might take 5 hours to review and take notes on — that's normal, not a sign you're stupid. If you don't ask, the pile of unanswered questions turns into a feeling of confusion, and then into boredom.
2. Other people in the group getting results sooner. Watching them makes you anxious, makes you try to skip stages, and you botch everything. Two numbers to steady yourself with: even the fastest person needs at least about 3 months; and results spread very widely — 3–4 months / 6 months / 1 year / 1.5–2 years are all normal.

An ignorant kind of comparison: you practice 2 hours a day, they practice 6 hours a day, and yet you demand equal progress. The teacher's own estimate of the proportion who keep up with the method is around 60–70%, and that figure spreads out over time rather than ever being 100% all at once.

Choosing a reason, or choosing a result

Adults always have a very reasonable-sounding reason: busy with work, taking care of the kids, tired. The teacher's condensed question: do you choose the reason, or do you choose the result?

This comes with an attitude toward asking questions: no practice → no questions → no correction → no results → and then you turn around and blame the instructor. Hiding your own ignorance only hurts yourself. A phrase the teacher likes to use — "put your pride down to make money" — means lower your ego and lower the pile of failure experience you're carrying, not doing anything shady.

Putting it into practice

1. When you feel confused / afraid / want to jump to another system → place yourself in circle 2, and recognize that excuse-making is starting. Don't switch systems.
2. Schedule rewatching lectures: each video at least 3 passes, each pass spaced apart from the last by a stretch of real experience.
3. During a dull market phase ⇒ shift all your time into reviewing material + backtesting the past, instead of forcing yourself to find a trade.
4. When comparing yourself to others, only compare time invested, never compare results.
5. Write out a 5-year vision → break it into goals → attach discipline. See SMART goals in trading.

What the teacher stresses / common traps

• 5 years is shorter than you think. Look back at 2017, then look at 2022 — it's a blink. 5 years is enough for a complete financial breakthrough, but only once enough knowledge has accumulated.
• The final destination doesn't need to be lofty: you don't need 30–50%/month, just 15%/month sustained for 5 years is already an enormous achievement. And this is one of the few fields that can produce that kind of return without being controlled by politics, society, staffing, marketing, supply and demand.
• Self-imposed discipline is harder than discipline imposed on you. A boss paying 15–20 million VND/month who demands reports and KPIs — everyone does it. But forcing yourself to sit for 15–20 minutes in the evening with a pen and notebook — for a job that could bring in millions of dollars — and you get lazy. See the iceberg of trading.
• What makes a leader isn't expertise. Looking at expertise alone, plenty of chairmen fall far short of the employees they pay. The difference lies in: vision → goal → discipline and persistence. Apply that exactly to trading.
• The most important trap: instant understanding = no progress. Anything you master the instant you learn it doesn't have enough weight to lift you to a higher level.
• The teacher states clearly he's only sharing theory about finance and trading, not trying to lecture people on life in other areas.

FOUR NOTES FOR BEGINNERS — and the paradox of "more knowledge, more confusion"

The teacher reads out four notes from The Way of the Trade for people new to the profession:

1. Don't overindulge in accumulating knowledge beyond the core principles. Stay alert and avoid the trap of pointless debate. Failing and then going to look for a new method = not admitting that the root of the problem is psychology.
2. Don't chase rigid systems / indicators / parameters. The "cross up, buy; cross down, sell" style forces the market into a fixed mold, and that mold caps your very ability to face how the market changes.
3. Observe and take careful notes — the market is the best teacher; every sign you need is already sitting right there on the chart.
4. Learn the fundamentals, then put a SMALL amount of money in as tuition. The real obstacle is inside yourself. (Livermore: the only way to be trained is to start, track your own trades, and study your own mistakes.)

The paradox of this job: in other professions, the more knowledge, the more success; in trading, the more systems, the more confusion, the more restless your mind gets. The teacher tells his own story of having studied many systems and then having to cut most of them away himself.

Why the vicious circle keeps circling back to "fix the system": once you already have a proper, logical system with good probability, 99% of what's left is psychology (a figure the teacher gave in the session, not a statistic). But the human brain likes actions that give instant results — like a kid sweeping the house for candy, studying to get a game console. Fixing psychology and discipline gives no visible result right away, so motivation is very weak, and people quietly slide back to whatever gives a more visible result: going to find a new indicator. That's exactly the mechanism that keeps feeding the circle in this note.

A final word on bots / AI: a bot that reliably earns 5%/month doesn't exist — if it did, someone would already have bought it for millions, billions of dollars. Robots and AI can't read the story behind the price, because the market moves on human greed and fear, not on parameters.

An illustrative case (mechanical error): a student sent in an analysis in checklist form — "1M down, 1W up, 1D like this, H4 like that → conclusion." The teacher pointed out: that's just listing states, with no logic connecting RSI to where the price leg actually sits. The correct way is to draw out the RSI to picture where the 1D downward leg currently sits within the bigger timeframe (1W); only if 1D opens up one more leg does that become the first downward wave of 1W. (Details in step-by-step analysis process.)

Reviewing: "misunderstanding is more dangerous than forgetting"

Once you already have three things — a knowledge perspective, real market experience, and your own greed–aversion–craving map — reviewing from the opening session onward is no longer relearning. The person sitting there listening the second time is not the same person, so the exact same lecture opens up a layer of meaning that couldn't be seen the first time.

The sharpest argument of this session:

More dangerous than forgetting knowledge is MISUNDERSTANDING knowledge.

If you forget, you know you've forgotten and you'll go look it back up. If you misunderstand, you still act with confidence — and every time you act, it reinforces the wrong understanding a little more. That's why the required attitude for reviewing is "treat it as if you know nothing", not fast-forwarding past what you already have memorized. The teacher's comparison: even watching a movie without focus makes you miss plot details, let alone a subject like this one.

The purpose of learning decides the quality of learning. The teacher quotes an actual message from a student of a previous cohort, which precisely describes the three stages most learners pass through:

1. Learning half-heartedly — showing up just to be present.
2. Grinding through it — knowing you have to learn but not yet seeing why it's worthwhile.
3. Falling in love with the knowledge — and that student remarked that for the same amount of time spent, it feels far more "satisfying."

This is worth paying attention to: the gap in effectiveness between stage 1 and stage 3 doesn't come from the number of hours studied, it comes from the state of mind you bring into the session. A 40–60-minute clip re-listened to at stage 3 is where something you'd already heard back at stage 1 finally clicks.

The real test: the 2–3 week period without the teacher is exactly the test — how you handle the market on your own, how you teach yourself when no one is there to remind you.

There is no shortcut from hanoi to saigon

The main metaphor: from A to B there is only one road. Going from Hanoi to Saigon, you take National Highway 1; looping through Laos, Cambodia, Thailand just wastes effort and gets you lost. The trap is exactly this: you get to Ninh Bình, to Thanh Hoá, and start getting bored, and people turn around and ask, "which road should I take now?" — when the answer is still the same road, you just haven't gone far enough on it yet.

Applied to the learning path:

• The first 6 months (~60 sessions) have the teacher supporting three things: knowledge, market direction, and psychological energy. The teacher says plainly that part of this phase's results comes from still having something to lean on.
• The next 6 months is where the real journey begins: learning from your own mistakes and breaking free of the guide's emotional influence. The knowledge is already there by this point; what's still missing is discipline and psychology.
• The familiar "changing course mid-stream" mechanism: emotion gets dragged around by the market → you look for a way to justify it → each day you "get creative" a little more → you drift further from the standard system → and you wrongly conclude that the system has stopped working.

The formula the teacher gives: time × productivity = expertise. And a very blunt description of what people usually bring into this job: little time + poor productivity + demanding high results.

The chain: faith – effort – mindfulness – concentration – wisdom

The teacher draws on Buddhist terms, using them to explain why persistence is a word that has to be "stamped straight into your brain":

The usable point here: it shows that persistence isn't the first level, it's the fourth level. Anyone who hasn't truly believed in the path yet (faith) and hasn't put in enough real effort yet (effort) — even if they force themselves to be "persistent," that's just enduring, and it will fall apart.

Careful: This is how the teacher interprets these terms to teach trading, not a standard Buddhist definition — present it this way if it's used in a write-up. In the transcript "power of effort" was captioned inconsistently as different terms.

A counterweight illustrative case: a female student, after 2 years, reached 8–10%/month and reported it with a lot of confidence — not because the number was big, but because for her, that was enough, no greed for more. The teacher places next to that a notable admission: after he steps back, some proportion of students still fall away — because in the end, everyone has to stand on their own two feet. And the reason he teaches up to 60 sessions instead of 10–15 sessions (even though people still enroll either way) isn't about business efficiency.

Related lessons

• SMART goals in trading — a 5-year vision broken down into measurable goals