One must experience a significant loss.

I think the biggest driver for my growth has been losses, and they are huge and occur rapidly (( is not a floating loss). The benefit of large losses is not just that it helps people have better risk judgment, but rather it allows you to maintain a numb and calm mindset towards losses, enabling you to continue to boldly place large bets when opportunities arise without leaving the table.

Pursuing small drawdowns and comparing the risk-reward ratio with institutions does not have much significance for retail investors. 1) Institutions need a smooth curve. 2) The most undervalued assets for retail investors are time and transaction costs. Therefore, the starting point for institutions, especially hedge funds, is completely different from that of retail investors, and there is not much learning value. Instead, blindly pursuing small drawdowns and being overly conservative in upside potential is quite limited. I know one person who had 10x returns by heavily investing in TSLA and NV in succession. It looks like this in hindsight, but even if we went back and gave countless people equal opportunities, it would still be unachievable.

High-performing practitioners who excel at problem-solving are accustomed to linear expectation differentials, which is inherently contrary to the nature of long-term stocks. Once expectations deviate even slightly, they immediately waver and cut their positions. Becoming a thinker outside of established patterns and a believer is rare and difficult under the East Asian education system. This includes observing many regrets throughout the history of primary markets; in fact, the legends are just a few individuals who have gone around in circles. Most people are merely indecisive ones consumed by internal strife on the IC. Perhaps it's not a matter of personality, but rather of culture. Conservatism is the baseline. The baseline is about not making mistakes, rather than being brave.

So, being overly tense and conservative to control drawdowns, but then an uncontrollable factor leads to a significant loss, causing one to collapse. Many collapses are not entirely due to losing money, but rather an inability to accept such a humiliating failure. Failure is a complete denial of the meaning of life and self-pride.

Losing a lot of money is a good thing; once you get used to it, your mindset opens up a lot. Losing A8's money after A7, and then needing to lose A8's money after A9, are all very normal and necessary experiences.