Self Entertainment part 2
If I have so much trouble keeping myself busy on the weekend, what did I do before I went back to school.
There were two time wasters that I am not participating in that used to dominate my free time. I have stopped watching TV for the most part, and would happily stop watching it completely. TV was truly just a time waster on the weekends, as anything I actually wanted to watch, I would watch in the evenings during the week the day after it aired. The weekends would be filled with “let’s see what is on.”
The second time waster was reading fiction. Reading is something I really enjoy, and I still read a lot, but now I limit myself to reading fiction an hour a day or less. Fiction really was a vice, as I would read in the evenings after work, and read away most of the weekend. How is that a vice? Did anything get down around the house before I went back to school (no), did I advance my understanding of investing (no), or did I work hard to develop new in demand skills so I could leave my shitty job (yes, after 3 years of no). If I was going to let me life slip by, I should have at least read erotic fiction.
Now I have time to work on learning options, which is my current focus. A down market is a great time to learn how to do things better, because it is obvious that no one is making easy money. Huge losses in “safe” investments really makes one rethink what diversifying actually means. So many lessons are obvious right now.
But all this free time means there are no deadlines, and there is nothing but self discipline to force me to spend time studying options.
To help focus myself, I have two goals now. I would like to be trading options profitably by this time next year, even if it is simple covered calls or naked put strategies. I also want to be far enough along in my options trading that I can consider a mentoring program to help improve my options trading. Obviously, if I am not already trading options profitably on my own, then there is very little to fine tune. It would be like me asking Michael Phelps to help me with my butterfly, when I usually skip all the butterfly in practice. I want to develop a solid base to work from, before I go asking experts to help me fine tune.