What may be the con­nec­tion between yesterday’s post on Trading’s Mid-Life Cri­sis: Get­ting Big­ger Vs. Get­ting Broader, writ­ten by a trader and author­ity in trad­ing psy­chol­ogy, and Time Magazine’s arti­cle on How to bring schools into 21st cen­tury?

Let’s first read a cou­ple of quotes from the shools article:

-“Many ana­lysts believe that to achieve the right bal­ance between such core knowl­edge and what edu­ca­tors call “portable skills” crit­i­cal think­ing, mak­ing con­nec­tions between ideas and know­ing how to keep on learn­ing the U.S. cur­ricu­lum needs to become more like that of Sin­ga­pore, Bel­gium and Swe­den, whose stu­dents out­per­form Amer­i­can stu­dents on math and sci­ence tests. Classes in these coun­tries dwell on key con­cepts that are taught in depth and in care­ful sequence, as opposed to a suc­ces­sion of for­get­table details so often served in U.S. class­rooms. Text­books and tests sup­port this approach.”

- “Coun­tries from Ger­many to Sin­ga­pore have extremely small text­books that focus on the most pow­er­ful and gen­er­a­tive ideas,” says Roy Pea, co-director of the Stan­ford Cen­ter for Inno­va­tions in Learn­ing. These might be the key the­o­rems in math, the laws of ther­mo­dy­nam­ics in sci­ence or the rela­tion­ship between sup­ply and demand in eco­nom­ics. America’s bloated text­books, by con­trast, tend to gal­lop through a mind-numbing stream of top­ics and subtopics in an attempt to address a vast range of state standards.”

Those so-called ““portable skills” are basi­cally what neu­ropsy­chol­o­gists call Exec­u­tive Func­tions.

Another exam­ple is Aware­ness, or the abil­ity to eval­u­ate one’s own cog­ni­tive func­tion­ing and act appro­pri­ately. We have iden­ti­fied a few exec­u­tive func­tions so far: 1) Aware­ness, 2) crit­i­cal think­ing, 3) mak­ing con­nec­tions between ideas and 4) know­ing how to keep on learn­ing.

Let’s now review some quotes from Trading’s Mid-Life Cri­sis: Get­ting Big­ger Vs. Get­ting Broader, by Brett N. Steen­barger.

- Aware­ness: “And, in life as in trad­ing, we face the issue of get­ting big­ger vs. get­ting broader. Do I build on suc­cess by grow­ing my com­pany and doing more of what is work­ing, or do I begin to develop other aspects of my life and use this suc­cess as an oppor­tu­nity to widen my horizons?”

- Crit­i­cal think­ing: “The prob­lem with get­ting big­ger is that you’re bound to be at your max­i­mum size when mar­kets change and your edge erodes. I have seen this occur with many very suc­cess­ful traders at prop firms. In a sense, they were one-trick ponies and all their eggs were in the bas­ket of that one trick.”

- Mak­ing con­nec­tions: “It truly is a mid-life cri­sis for traders. In the mid-life cri­sis we nor­mally think about, we get to the point where we’re estab­lished in a career field and in a marriage/family. We real­ize that either we’re going to coast to the fin­ish line or tackle some­thing new and chal­leng­ing while we still have enough time and youth­ful energy to see it through. That ‘s really the same issue fac­ing the suc­cess­ful trader.”

- Learn­ing how to learn: “Second-order com­pe­tence is the abil­ity to mas­ter mar­kets as they change (…) that’s what the great artists do. They don’t just paint, write, or sing in the same style the same way through­out their careers. They remake them­selves and keep their work fresh.”

In short, over the long run, what suc­cess­ful traders and stu­dents have in com­mon is that they know how to learn AND never stop learn­ing. In a fastly evolv­ing world, it should come to no sur­prise that surf­ing new waves and adapt­ing to new envi­ron­ments is a must. Schools, par­ents, and com­mu­ni­ties and all of us should view the devel­op­ment of exec­u­tive func­tions as an edu­ca­tion pri­or­ity. And traders should read Brett’s post.

For related read­ing, you can now check out

- Cog­ni­tive Neu­ro­science and Edu­ca­tion Today

- Stu­dent Achieve­ment Gap, Stress, and Self-Regulation

- Enhanc­ing Trader Per­for­mance and The Psy­chol­ogy of Trad­ing: Inter­view with Brett N. Steenbarger

- Dr. Elkhonon Gold­berg on Brain Fit­ness Pro­grams and Cog­ni­tive Training

- An ape can do this. Can we not?