I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Monday Musings, I write freely and wanderingly about some topic that’s on my mind.
As an abstract artist, I developed my own style and personal artistic point of view only once I stopped imitating other people’s art, following online tutorials, and using other people’s techniques, instead experimenting with my own.
Now I’m doing that with options trading. I started by following a set of rules defined by someone else. I did this for two to three months and saw some profits. More valuable, I observed patterns and I started to think of ways I could develop my own short put trading playbook.
In her book Goddesses in Older Women: Archetypes in Women Over Fifty, Jungian analyst Jean Shinoda Bolen writes of the pre-Olympian goddess of wisdom, Metis, Zeus’ first wife. The Greek word metis, derived from this goddess’ name, began to mean “wise counsel” or “practical wisdom.”
Shinoda Bolen writes:
You may call upon metis in running a household easily and well, knowing that what appears to others as mere efficiency is actually creating harmony. In the studio, metis is more than the sum of the skills you have acquired and made your own; it becomes an alchemical process through which inspired work can come. If you are in business, politics, or law and have metis, your wisdom helps to steer a wise course, to get to the heart of a matter, to settle conflicts through mediation and dialogue, to work out mutually satisfactory outcomes rather than winning at the other’s expense. Metis in this sense is a form of diplomacy that takes a long-range view as to what the best outcome is for all. For a scholar, the wisdom of metis is a discerning and creative way of thinking that makes it possible to see a pattern to the research or find an explanation for the evidence. If the wisdom of Metis grows or deepens in the course of your life, then metis will be a crone-age attribute.
As I evolve as a trader who follows other people’s playbooks to developing, following, and refining my own, I call on the wisdom of Metis.
Shinoda Bolen suggests that a woman may experience developing her own authentic authority as a mother, and then later (or at the same time) when committing to an activity in which she must define her own path:
Having to make decisions in the emotionally charged moment, trusting instinct or intuition when there isn’t adequate information, coping with the situation and learning as you go from mistakes, and developing confidence and an authentic style of your own go into the process of becoming a mother. This is also so when a commitment is made to a craft, a skill, or work that cannot be done “by the book” or under the direction of someone in authority. When you cease to look to experts for authority and trust your own expertise, you find your own metis.
Metis guided me as I developed myself as an artist. Now I call on her to guide me in the markets.