I have a client across the border in Oregon from where I'm based - Washington - who has a number of pigeons infesting part of his property. I do work for him on a regular basis for insect and arachnid pests, but when I mentioned to him that I take care of avian concerns also, he hired me on the spot for it.
It is becoming an increasingly common type of job for me, this pigeon sniping. Frequently I have to do it in densely populated urban environments, so accurate shot placement is critical. Stray shots can damage property or people, so I make sure they do not happen. That's where "one shot, one kill" comes in.
I fire once, and I hit the target. The pigeon I'm aiming at goes down, and the near-hypersonic flying lead pellet is safely lodged in the pigeon's body where it cannot continue traveling and hit something it shouldn't. This isn't easy to do - if it were, no one would need to hire me to do it.
I am not a natural.
I didn't pick up a rifle one day and start shooting fleas off of a dog's back. When I started off with my first BB gun at age eight, I wouldn't even have been able to shoot the dog. Through years and years of plinking at various inanimate objects, I slowly got those tiny projectiles nearer and nearer to the target. Eventually, I hit one or two.
When I entered service with the U.S. Army, they taught me a whole lot more about shooting. I learned techniques in basic training at Ft. Benning, Georgia that had me putting 5.56mm rounds into a circle the size of a quarter from 300 meters away. But still, there was the need to practice...
So here I am now, using all of these techniques, hitting targets, pleasing customers, and still I must practice. I am not a natural. This ability is not inherent to me. I have to study it and maintain it.
Many things are like this.
Pick something you're bad at. It doesn't matter if it is something you really want to do or otherwise. Just ask yourself: could you do this thing better if you kept trying? If you took the time to learn its ways instead of experimenting randomly, don't you think you would do better at it? Do you think you'll be able to tell viable techniques from bad ones without practice?
The reason this is on my mind right now is that from time to time I get emails from individuals who are interested in what I do with Forex. I don't do anything fancy at all, and you could fairly say that what I do barely qualifies as trading, but it's unfamiliar territory to many and they hesitate to get in. To be more precise, many of the people who have contacted me about that stuff are afraid of making mistakes, not necessarily taking Forex for a spin.
That can be good, but it can also be bad, and the bad part about this sort of caution is the assumption that everyone else having some success with it instantly did so. I get where a lot of these people are coming from - they want in, but they don't want to blow it and have to face the scorn of "the naturals." (This would never happen anyway unless one admits it in a public forum of some sort, so clearly this is a sort of invented anxiety only.)
Maybe there are some naturals out there, but they're probably few and far between. Most people having some success with Forex probably screwed up a lot to begin with. I certainly did, but I kept at it. Little by little, I got more and more on target.
That could be you, too. Just say to yourself, "I am not a natural," then get in there and learn how to do it anyway. Then try again, and again, and again. You'll never become a natural, but you could become someone just as good.
One shot, one kill. Wasn't always, but wasn't ever "never will."
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