Would you rather:
A) Have a lifelong career that is guaranteed to evolve with you and keep you reasonably happy and satisfied, with a great starting salary and regular merit increases, promotions and bonuses?
B) Win the lottery where you win big, but not big enough to be set for life and never have to work again in your life, nor do your current or future kids and grandkids? The kind of lottery win where you still have to invest that money, maybe start a business and risk having it fail, risk losing your winnings and rejoining the masses again.
To complete this analogy, option A is learning how to trade (likely swing trade) consistently, over a long period of time, using the power of compound gains and enjoying the process of becoming better and better at it. Option B is to spend your entire life treating the markets like a lottery, spending a lot of or even all of your spare money trying to hit it big with a stock or a crypto token. In the end, you may win big but since you are working with way less money to begin with than multimillionaires, your big win will not make you big rich. You will be a little rich and forced to look for more big wins, losing a chunk of your first big win in the process and likely never winning again after all.
If you still prefer Option B, the pain of winning big but not big enough may be one of the most difficult things you would face under normal, everyday circumstances. The happiness of winning big, immediately followed by the anguish of realizing it is not big enough is unbelievably well shown in a Jason Statham movie called Wild Card- highly suggest you check it out. If you prefer Option A, then the right frame of mind may be to look for a mindset, thesis and technique that will thread your swing trading that golden thread through a million moving needles of the markets for long term consistency and success. There are two camps- those who say it is possible and those who say it is not. The markets are unpredictable, they can be volatile, there are black swan events and on and on they go. However, a day in most people's lives is exactly the same. In Canada, driving from Stoney Creek to Mississauga or even Toronto for work can result in serious injury or death every single day as our highways in this area are some of the craziest in all of North America. Any day you could make a mistake that would get you fired at work. You could have food poisoning every single day. Bottom line, it is impossible to insulate yourself from every single imaginable negative outcome of living in our world. However, we develop our own paradigms, thesis and techniques to get through the day, and sometimes we thrive and reap great rewards; other times we get days we hope we can forget. There are people like Bill Williams (fractals) who advocate that markets are a natural phenomenon, not an artificial human creation with artificial rules. If that is the case, we should be able to- if we are willing- to find a way to successfully participate in that natural phenomenon just as we do in other ones in our lives. In fact, I believe that the reason most of us do not is because accessibility to market participation has been limited until five minutes ago due to failures of our education system and a snobbish disregard for our desire to do it successfully by the easily threatened institutional investors.
Bottom line, I feel that the pursuit of success in the markets is like learning to play Street Fighter really, really well. :P Sure, even if you master many different characters, all of their special moves and combos, someone might win against you by just mashing buttons. If you can stomach these occasional losses, over time thanks to the effort you invested in masterfully kicking ass with Ryu or Vega or whichever character will make you a winner with way more wins than losses. Food for thought, dearest readers.