Secret To Wealth Generation:Know Thyself

A lot of people make a lot of money buying things at a deep discount by some metric. Buying when things have sold off substantially at really really cheap levels when the sentiment is negative, the price is cheap and the fear of company collapsing is high. Buying individual stocks when an industry has been incredibly weak is a tactic that works well. However, there are plenty of people who trade stocks near highs, using momentum strategies and high tight flag breakouts and looking for lots of small swings to compound their success rate. Either strategy can be designed to work, however ultimately they don't work if you cannot follow a needed strategy to let the wins outweigh the losers substantially such that you have asymmetric risk/reward. What that means is, more important than the specific stocks you buy or methods you take is your own ability to follow the strategy in a profitable manner. As such, one of the great important secrets has been repeated for ages since perhaps even before Plato taught Socrates the Delphic maxim: "know thyself".
If you cannot take a loss and sell when a stock has gone down, you should not trade momentum strategies. If you cannot be incredibly patient you should not consider investing at a deep discount since that which is priced low can become even more cheaply priced and take sufficiently long for the market to recognize its true value. If you cannot do either you may consider maintaining allocation strategies or implementing tactics which ease some of the burdens of your own weaknesses. A mixed strategy for example may work well for some. Setting and forgetting it through index investing may also work for some. You not only need to have a strategy with an edge but the implementer (you) of the strategy also needs an edge. If you cannot implement a strategy, perhaps you can hire someone who can. At any rate, you need to work around your weaknesses and surround yourself with people that can compliment or strengthen your weaknesses, or find a strategy that is able to limit the effect the weaknesses have on your account.
Some people may be more fit for real estate investing or building startup businesses and flipping them or growing online businesses or buying existing businesses rather than managing capital in financial exchanges.
Some people may have natural abilities but may need to invest their time in acquiring the knowledge off a particular field in order to be successful. Regardless of the process taken to generate wealth ultimately you can be positively effective simply by knowing your strengths and weaknesses and keeping them in mind when developing your plan.