Chapter Seven: Recreation as Re-Creation

Immersion in play is a hallmark of our childhood years.  It is when we grow up and outgrow play that we lose the energy and wonder of youth.  During play, we engage in activities purely for the joy of doing.  We are not trying to achieve particular ends, whether to make money, achieve recognition, or cross items off to-do lists.  Play is activity undertaken purely for its own sake.  The doing is the reward.

A radical renewal of our lives requires a return to the childhood mode, where our life's activities are pursued for their own sake.  In the trading arena, this means loving the process of finding and exploiting opportunity, not just the hoped-for profits.  Let's examine how we can fuel the soul by rediscovering play and the sense of re-creation.

When Our Work Is Our Play

For many years I traded financial markets.  Then, when my work as a psychologist in the financial world became full-time, trading became impossible.  For those practical reasons, and also because of legal/compliance constraints, I discontinued market involvement altogether.  Throughout my trading, I enjoyed the process of market research, updating various measures of trend, cycle, buying, selling, volatility, etc.  I spent over an hour each evening collecting and interpreting data, assembling pieces of the market puzzle.  Even after busy work and trading days, I had no problem keeping up with the market research.  Updating the statistics and revisiting that puzzle was like reading an engrossing novel.  I couldn't wait to turn the page and see how it ended!

Something interesting occurred when I stopped trading.  In a sense, there was no point to updating markets, because I was not going to express any market ideas.  Still, however, I collected the data and maintained dozens of spreadsheets!  It wasn't simply out of habit.  It was because I loved the process of exploration.  The data were a way of seeing a reality beneath the surface, and that was fascinating--intrinsically rewarding--in its own right.  I performed detailed analyses out of sheer intellectual curiosity.  Those efforts gave energy; they didn't at all feel like work.  To my pleasant surprise, the research kept me on top of markets in a way that helped my work with traders, alerting me to the challenges they faced.

Meaningful work involves creation.  That is true when we are parents, when we start businesses, when we help others--whenever we do things that matter to us.  Our efforts generate something that hadn't been there before:  products, services, knowledge, and beauty.  That is fundamentally creative.  As the example of my market research suggests, our best efforts occur when our creation is also re/creation.  Engaging in activities for their own sake, we pour ourselves into the doing, accessing that  flow state we discovered in Chapter Six.

Consider this:  If we work solely for an outcome--for the sake of something outside of the work itself--we will never achieve our best efforts.  It is when we tap into our flow state that we find our greatest creativity, see what others cannot see, and achieve what others cannot attain.  Reaching the flow state only occurs when we are immersed in doing for its own sake.  That can only happen when our hardest work becomes our most engrossing play.  Anything else runs into frustrations, and those take us out of our zone.  The running water that Saint Teresa refers to is the flow of the soul, a flow we once experienced in childhood.  

The important implication here is that radical renewal is continuous renewal.  Life is ever renewing when our creation is also our recreation; when our work is our play.  In the renewal mode, work is not just doing; it's also a state of being.  What parts of your trading are fun?  What parts are play?  How often are you simply immersed in the joy of doing when searching, re-searching, and trading markets?  This is why successful traders spend as much time studying markets and working on themselves as actually trading.  It's what keeps Olympic athletes practicing and refining themselves day after day, week after week for a shot at the medal; it's what keeps concert musicians practicing, practicing to perfect a performance; it's what keeps the entrepreneur building and building the business before a dime of profits can be realized.  At some level, we have to love the doing, not just the rewards of the doing.

When trading becomes all about winning and losing, profits and losses, we lose the sense of play.  Our trees no longer find the nourishment of running water.  Success follows when our hard work is our recreation.

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Retiring the Concept of Retirement

As I reflect, I can see that the most enjoyable times in my life have been those in which I worked hard and played hard.  Even now, at an age when many people retire, I work long hours, take on multiple projects, and find time for travel, socializing, and family.  I'm often asked when I'm going to retire.  It's a question that I struggle to answer.  When your work is your play--when your activities speak to you and connect you to your deepest values--why would you want to quit?  

Too often, retirement is the opposite of working and playing hard.  As we saw earlier, it often is a retreat to a relatively sedentary life, with minimal work effort and lots of daily routine.  In such a mode, there can be little flow state and thus little innovation and creativity.  We don't test our limits and thus never catch that second wind of consciousness that keeps us energized.  Because everything in life follows the principle of "use it or lose it", retirement can bring profound loss:  loss of physical fitness, loss of the closeness of family ties, loss of creative and productive effort.
  
Much of getting old is the result of disuse.  Sadly, with physical and cognitive deterioration, we also experience a spiritual deterioration.  Just as invigorating mind and body can help us tap into our spirit, the lack of physical and cognitive challenge sets the stage for a withering of the soul.  Many retired people I've known have fallen back into a state of material comfort, ceasing to learn, grow, and contribute to the world.  I've seen it first hand:  retired life becomes a familiar daily routine punctuated by occasional self-indulgences.  How can life be renewing if we are self-absorbed, not absorbed in this wonderful life we've been given?

The key to a long and happy life is replacing the ideal of continual recreation with the lifestyle of continual re-creation.  Exiting the loop of 40 hour work weeks can become an opportunity to engage life afresh, with hard work that is also hard play.  If the sole goal of working is not-working, our reward will be getting old--the very opposite of renewal.

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How Well Do We Play?

For most of us, work involves periods of stimulating creation and periods of dull routine; episodes of fulfillment and ones of frustration.  A great deal of the time, our work does not feel like play.  Too often it feels like, well, work.

That is why it is so important that our time alternate between periods of work and non-work, creation and recreation.  

In a recent TraderFeed blog post, I cited an article about how a winning basketball team excelled in the third quarter of games because of its unique halftime routines.  The team used the break at halftime to not only review the first half and make adjustments, but also to highlight what the team had done well.  This confidence-building renewed the team's energy and helped them dramatically outscore their opponents in the second half of games.

This is a great example of alternating work time and break time in a way that inspires and energizes.  Structured properly, our evening time is a great break between work days; our weekends between work weeks; our vacations between long stretches of effort.  How we approach our break time--how well we play--is critical to the creative success of our work.  Work without high quality periods of non-work lays the groundwork for burnout.

We've seen that nothing so defines the opposite of renewal as burnout.  When we are burned out, we are depleted.  It feels as though everything we do takes energy.  Efforts undertaken for their own sake give energy.  They sustain us.  When we take in air through respiration, we sustain our life functions.  The spiritual equivalent of respiration is inspiration.  We absorb energy that moves us forward.

Burnout typically results from time compression.  We have too much to do in the time available and that leads us to exhaust ourselves in vain efforts to meet expectations.  We are taught that even the Creator took a rest on the seventh day and made that day special.  Without re-creation, we cannot properly appreciate creation.

There is a deep psychology underlying the tradition of observing a Sabbath day each week.  For six days, we engage in doing:  we create.  During that time, we are not satisfied with the status quo: we generate more things and new things.  On the seventh day, we stop generating.  We take the time to appreciate what we have created.  That appreciative mindset is one that restores us.  Think of the glow we feel when we truly appreciate our friends, families, and life opportunities.  The Sabbath day is meant to be more than the rest we discussed in the previous chapter.  It's a day of glow, a period of sheer appreciation.  This is play, not in the sense of making merry and having fun, but in the spiritual sense.  Spiritual work means deepening our experience and connecting to larger sources of meaning and purpose.  Spiritual play means standing back and reveling in the fulfillment of that depth.

The trap many of us fall into is using our re-creation time as a time of pure rest.  We stop doing.  We catch up on sleep, we watch TV, we relax.  That is all well and good, but does that renew us?  If we merely alternate between work and non-work, we never tap into the positive energy of play.  Time spent with the right people is social play.  The time we take to stretch, utilize, and exercise our bodies is physical play.  Creativity is play with ideas and materials.  As we've just seen, reflecting upon the good we create--appreciation--is a form of spiritual play.

This has tremendous relevance for our trading processes.  Yes, it's good to occasionally take breaks from screens during the trading day, and it's good to take occasional vacations from trading.  But what do we do during that break time?  It's not enough to stop trading; we have to start playing in other ways.  Too often, break time is not fun time.  It's a time of not-doing, but it doesn't rejuvenate us.  That keeps us on a burnout trajectory.

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Loving What You Do

Have you ever been in a relationship that started well, but fizzled out?  There was an initial attraction, but you never reached the point of falling in love.  Being in love is much more than infatuation.  Love comes from the soul and the special experience of joining your life to the life of another person.

As we saw in the last chapter, there is nothing more common than to hear traders speak of their "passion" for trading.  Too often, that reflects infatuation and a preoccupation with the ego-benefits of making good market calls and generating profits.  In very successful careers, people are in love with what they do.  As in a relationship, they join themselves to their work in such a way that the work becomes an expression of who they are.  An artist isn't merely someone who has a 9-to-5 job painting canvases.  Artists and their artwork are intimately joined.

All too often I see young traders begin their trading careers as they might begin relationships:  with passion that ultimately is not sustained.  They never reach that point of intimacy where work and play are blurred:  where the work is a deep expression of who they are.  They may love to trade, but their relationship to financial markets is not one of true love.  For them, markets are merely a means to an end of getting rich.  No one has a passion for lottery tickets; they just want to win the lottery!  The trader who is focused on the big score treats markets as a lottery.  There is nothing intrinsic there to sustain interest when the jackpot doesn't arrive.

Love is defined by sharing, by commitment, by a giving of oneself to the other.  When we focus on what we can get from our partner, that is not love.  When traders focus on what they can get from markets, that, too, is not love.  It is self-absorption, the very opposite of a spiritual commitment.

We are most likely to be in love with our work when our work is an extension of who we are.  I'm not a psychologist part-time; it's a function of my interests, strengths, and skills and what I find meaningful in life.  Similarly, I engaged in market research when I wasn't trading not to make money, but because searching and re-searching is part of who I am and what I find fulfilling.  

Many traders fall out of love with trading because it's ultimately not who they are, what they do best, and what is most meaningful to them.  There is no shame in that, just as there is no shame in moving on from a dating relationship that never quite blossoms.  To force a relationship when love isn't there creates frustrations and conflicts down the road.  To force a trading career when one is not truly in love with the process of market mastery similarly leads to dis-stress.  In such a situation, the problem is not with trading psychology.  The problem is that trading is not nourishing the spirit.  Passion may be there, but not true love.
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It sounds strange, but most of us could benefit from working on our play.  Yes, yes, yes, we work on our work and strive to achieve and succeed.  How many articles and books have been written on peak performance, getting ahead, and self-improvement?  Many of those offer excellent, practical advice.  But will that advice lead us to happier, more fulfilling lives?  Whether we are religious or not, we need periods of Sabbath.  We require breaks from what we do in order to simply be.  Without play, life begins to feel like work--and that is the beginning of burnout and our alienation from soul.

Your Career And Your Calling

When we identify with our work and grow in performing it, our job becomes a career.  I could land a job as a maintenance worker or as a member of a construction crew fixing roadways.  (Indeed, I've held both positions).  Those were different from my work as a psychologist.  A job is something I do.  A career expresses something of who I am, what I am good at.  I work at a job to obtain the income to support myself.  I participate in a career as a vehicle for development.

When a career captures the essence of who we are, it becomes a calling.  We push ourselves to grow in a career, but callings pull us.  I can give up a career in one field and take up another.  If what truly calls me, however, is artwork or helping others, that's not something I can simply discard and replace.  As we noted, an artist is an artist 24/7.  A mother is always a mother.  It's no longer a job or even a career.  It's a calling, a deep expression of who we are.

Distinctive strengths underlie genuine callings.  When we possess unique abilities, the exercise of those becomes profoundly rewarding.  We no longer have to discipline ourselves to get work done.  We are naturally wired to pursue our strengths.  When our work feels like work and never like re-creation, the odds are good that we're not fully aligned with our most distinctive capacities.  Jobs can be enjoyable and careers can be fulfilling, but callings are what we are meant to be doing.

Callings offer that radical renewal, because they continuously tap into our basic energy sources.  It takes work to get a job done.  Pouring ourselves into what we love--what speaks to us--isn't work.  

It's a privilege.

When we find something so meaningful that participating in it feels like a privilege, we operate on a plane completely different from the norm.  The relationship between us and what we do becomes one of love.  

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Resources and Perspectives

*  The Book of Catholic Wisdom offers a number of valuable perspectives that ring true in other faiths as well.  A wonderful quote from St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who lived in the 12th century, states that, "Love is self-sufficient; it is pleasing to itself and on its own account.  Love is its own payment, its own reward.  Love needs no extrinsic cause or result.  Love is the result of love, it is intrinsically valuable.  I love because I love; I love in order to love" (p. 145).  Just as love of our Creator brings us to a different spiritual level; just as love of a romantic partner brings us to a different level of intimacy and sharing, love for our work means we become invested in what we do.  The doing becomes "intrinsically valuable", making our creation a re-creation of our selves.

*  The Very Well Mind site summarizes findings related to creativity, noting that creativity occurs across a variety of levels.  They quote author Maya Angelou, who said of creativity, "The important thing is to use it.  You can't use up creativity.  The more you use it, the more you have."  What this suggests is that, when we exercise our capacity for re-creation, we become more re-creative.  Doing things for their own sake--for the love of doing--builds our ability to love.  A great personal goal is to schedule at least one activity each day that we perform solely for our love of the doing, with no concern for extrinsic reward.  It could be spending quality time with a child, partner, or friend; it could be a meaningful personal activity.  Following Angelou, the more we draw upon our intrinsic passions, the more passionate we become.  Can we truly succeed in financial markets if there isn't something we deeply love in the process of finding, expressing, and managing opportunity?

*  I generally listen to music while writing; very often it is music that conveys the joy of play.  Here is what I'm listening to at the moment, while occasionally sneaking a look at singer David Gahan, who clearly finds the recreation in his work.

*  This article suggests that trading success comes not just from working harder, but playing better.  Great traders literally play with information as one would play with a puzzle, assembling and reassembling the pieces to arrive at something coherent.  There are specific methods we can use to become better at playing with ideas.  Many of these require standing back from normal work routines and entering a more relaxed cognitive focus.  The trader glued to the screen is the least likely to generate creative insights.  Play is a different state from work; creativity requires a different state of consciousness than routine effort.  As Maria Popova notes in her Brain Pickings site, creative thought is most likely to occur during "pockets of stillness" in our lives.  We cannot love another person while our minds are cluttered; we cannot fully love what we are doing if we are swamped by routine.  To love, we must be focused on the objects of our affection.  Love cannot find full expression and experience amidst distraction.

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To be sure, for many of us, our daily work is not our calling.  We might find our calling in play:  the re-creations we pursue after work hours.  I know people who are capable and successful in their careers, but who pursue their true callings after hours.  They might be musicians, hikers, home brewers, or community leaders.  Their free-time activities express their most treasured values, their most basic strengths.  I have observed this in religious communities.  The members hold jobs and careers and support their families financially.  What is most important to them, however, is study, worship, and the sense of shared commitment within a dynamic community.  Their recreation is a different kind of creation that energizes the work week.

What is the kind of play that is so special to you--that so draws upon who you are--that it truly renews and inspires you?  Identifying your most energized moments and the experiences for which you are most grateful is an important start toward reworking your work--and your play.  If we are to operate with optimal energy, it is every bit as important to schedule/commit to our play time as our time on the job.

And what if we cultivate callings at work, at home, and in play?  Imagine that our lives naturally flow from one expression of our strengths to others.  That is the true opposite of burnout.  When life itself becomes a quilt work of callings, we live with energy, appreciation, and an ongoing sense of meaningfulness.  With multiple callings, your personal life fuels your trading and your trading can spark your personal life.  That's what you want from your personal/family life; your trading; your friendships; your activities.  Everything energizes and inspires, bringing the best out in you.

Living our callings is so much more than self-improvement.  It is the essence of self-transcendence.  What parts of your trading and personal lives give you energy?  That simple assessment will tell you a great deal about whether your life is all about work--or all about love and re-creation.  Each of us lives our life's story.  Let's make it a masterpiece.

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Key Takeaways - The problem with traditional "time management" is that it focuses on getting more done per unit of time rather than on the quality of the time we put in.  When our work is also our play, we reach that flow state where time passes without our notice and regularly reach our second wind.  Because that mode gives us energy, we are naturally more productive.  We are also self-renewing, able to sustain the kind of focus that accompanies our best trading.  An effective trading process, at some level, must feel like play or it will eventually drain us of the energy needed to fully absorb market action.

Practical Exercise - We've conducted a few exercises so far with our calendars.  An additional exercise is to hard wire periods of play into our daily and weekly schedules, so that we're always replenishing our energy and connecting with what we find to be intrinsically enjoyable.  This play time is necessary for us as individuals, but also for our closest relationships.  It is through play that we renew love and passion, in romance and in markets.

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