I truly believe that investing in stocks can change your life—whether for better or worse, it changes things. But the problem is, people start with money they’ve worked hard to earn, yet approach it as if it were a casual hobby. When I joined a securities firm, I was first exposed to stocks. I completely abandoned my previous career, re-entered another securities company as a junior researcher, rebuilt my experience there, and eventually transitioned into a fund manager role—retroactively crediting my prior experience and fully transforming my career. After switching to a stock-focused career, I attended investor meetups and met working professionals who were incredibly serious. In fact, I just came back from lunch yesterday where I met one such person—a former employee of a large corporation who transitioned into full-time trading. He came from an engineering background with zero financial experience. When we first met, his seed capital was tiny. Yet he never chased “home run” stocks; instead, he steadily grew his wealth through consistent, compound returns. I believe stocks aren’t about talent—they’re about effort. Having seen so many people around me succeed through hard work, I can’t help but think this way. When I first started trading after quitting my job, I lost money countless times and made so many mistakes that I became deeply discouraged. So much so that I recorded my entire computer screen all day long—documenting every missed opportunity, analyzing why I missed them, and reviewing every impulsive trade to understand exactly how I got swept up in emotion—all the way into the early morning hours. After quitting, I paid to attend every stock seminar I could find, and even now I spend dozens of dollars monthly on Neftkon content. I also study other traders’ trade journals and compare them with my own. Do you think someone like me—who double-majored in finance and accounting, analyzed companies at a research center, and managed both mutual and hedge funds—would have done all this because I didn’t understand stocks? No. I treated trading as an entirely new field: I emptied my mind of prior knowledge and started fresh. In fact, my existing financial knowledge often clashed with new concepts and made learning even harder. Anyway, I truly believe that investing in stocks changes your life—but as I always say, if money moves in and out of your account in a single day at the same scale as your annual salary, you absolutely cannot approach it casually. This is an incredibly serious endeavor—you must enter with full commitment. Yes, stocks can change your life—but they demand equal effort. Some people ask why they should study stocks. But to me, understanding your own meta-cognition, identifying your investment personality, and reviewing your investment decisions—all of that is part of studying. P.S. Even though this isn’t that long, I bet it’ll seem ridiculously long on X.