It was the middle of “winter” on the dusty plains of Kenya, a few kilometers outside the tiny village of Elangata Enterit.
A group of a dozen or so students from a small state school in rural Missouri were walking across the grasslands to visit the local villages. I, a youngster at just 19, was among them.
We were all entirely reliant on one man, our translator, Jackson, to guide us to our destination and protect us from the predation of the natural world around us.
And just at that moment, we needed some protection.
Because on our journey, we’d come across a small, wirey snake bearing the markings of the infamous, highly venomous black mamba.
Before any of us could react, Jackson had taken a small, Maasai sword, less than two feet long, scooped the snake into the sky, and cut it in thirds in midair, terminating the threat with extreme prejudice.
It took us all a moment to process what we’d just seen, which felt to many of us like a scene out of an action thriller.
This mild-mannered, soft-spoken man who had mastered three languages (English, Swahili, and the regional Maasai dialect in the villages around Elangata Enterit) had also, unbeknownst to us, mastered the skill of eliminating one of the most dangerous snakes in the world with ease and calm.
We walked on to our destination without any further threats, but the incident has stuck with me all these years later, for a number of reasons.
I never would have pegged Jackson, one of the kindest, funniest, and gentlest people I’ve ever met, to be capable of leaping into action and taking out a threat like that. (This picture is of me, red-eyed, 2010 photo and all, with Jackson back around the time of this story)
The thing is, we are all a product of our environments, and we are all conditioned by experience to fear the unknown.
For Jackson, snakes in the desert are not unknown, they’re a regular threat that needs to be dealt with.
Good traders adopt the same mindset about losing trades, bad earnings announcements, Fed meetings, complicated trade setups, and more.
The other element of this story is, truth be told, I have no idea if that snake was a black mamba.
To this day, I assume it was (sincerely), and the markings look right, but it could have been a much less dangerous and more common snake of Kenya.
I wasn’t an expert, so I didn’t know.
I needed to trust the expert in that environment to guide me through the situation. And he was happy to do so.
All of us have expertise in different fields. So we should have no hesitation trusting the experts in the fields we’re less experienced in.
If that’s trading for you, I’m happy to say that ProsperityPub has all the experts you could ever need to listen to.
That snake was hardly the only threat Jackson kept us safe from during our two weeks in Kenya.
He told us when elephants were in the area close enough that we shouldn’t travel.
He took care of the two biggest spiders I’ve ever seen in my life, even the one that climbed unsuspectingly onto the wall of one of the girls’ tents at night.
He was always prepared for whatever situation the environment threw at him. That’s what expertise gives you.
And I hope here at ProsperityPub, we can be the same kind of guide through the markets for traders of all experience levels.
The only warning I’ll give is this: if you encounter a black mamba, you’re on your own. ;)
To your prosperity,
Stephen Ground
Editor-in-Chief, ProsperityPub
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