Must You Have an Epiphany? Must It Come from Somewhere Else?

If you think you're too thin-skinned, please scroll away. Seriously, don't read this.

In all kinds of communities where people exchange ideas and share insights, there's one catchphrase we can never escape:

"I've had an epiphany."

The tone is usually light, as if saying "I get it now."

But it also carries weight, as heavy as saying "I've graduated."

What's even better is that this statement almost never requires proof.

When you say "I've had an epiphany," people rarely follow up with: "An epiphany about what? Can you reproduce it for the group? Give everyone an actionable version so we can all have an epiphany together?"

That won't happen. Communities always have a gentle unspoken agreement: an epiphany is your private property, not subject to audit.

Precisely because it's not subject to audit, "I've had an epiphany" has become the most cost-effective expression on the internet: it announces an emotional climax, implies you've reached a higher level, and naturally avoids all details.

You can even solve zero problems, yet you've already achieved "looking like you're solving problems."

But here's the thing: learning to trade is precisely the kind of field that refuses to cooperate with "looking like."

The market won't reward you just because you've "had an epiphany." It only cares about one thing: whether you can execute logically consistent actions under pressure.

Epiphanies are certainly romantic. One of the most moving passages in Zen narrative is "The Buddha holds up a flower, Mahakasyapa smiles." One second you're groping through the fog, the next it's as if a skylight opens, light pours in, all contradictions resolve themselves, and you ascend on the spot.

The epiphany strikes at humanity's deepest desire: compressing a long-term project into an instantaneous event.

What people fear most isn't that things are hard, but "not knowing how long until it works."

The story of epiphany offers a psychological promise: just wait a bit, you'll have an epiphany eventually. So we're willing to believe, and even our parents once believed, that the key to growth isn't in daily training, but in some moment of "suddenly getting it."

Up to this point, pursuing epiphanies is at most romantic, not fatal.

What's truly fatal is a more refined, more respectable, more self-indulgent illusion: having an epiphany from somewhere else.

That is: your goal is clearly A, but you go off to study B. You get a powerful sense of inspiration from B, and mistakenly believe A is already half-solved. But when you return to A, you're shocked to discover: what was A again?

I did exactly this when I was in school, and I did it very seriously.

I was particularly fond of reading "Those Things in the Ming Dynasty," and the part I was most obsessed with was Wang Yangming's enlightenment at Longchang. Master Yangming suddenly achieved clarity in desperate circumstances, suddenly unified knowledge and action. After reading it, I couldn't help but believe that if a person achieves enlightenment just once, they can be completely transformed. But just watching Wang Yangming's enlightenment wasn't enough, wasn't satisfying enough. I needed to have one myself.

My task at the time wasn't spiritual cultivation. My task was passing exams.

So I did something rather absurd. I read a large number of books like the "I Ching," "Tao Te Ching," and "Su Shu," trying to find "the great path to high scores" within them. I have to say, the reading experience was genuinely wonderful. I'd often read and suddenly feel awake, as if struck by a sudden blow of clarity, truly having the urge that "I've had an epiphany."

Then exams came, and when I encountered difficult problems, I still couldn't solve them.

At that moment I should have realized: what I'd gained wasn't the ability to solve problems. What I'd gained was a comfortable feeling of being able to explain the world.

This is the typical ending of "having an epiphany from somewhere else": a spiritual high, and a blank answer sheet in reality.

Many people will say: "But the classics really do contain great truths. Many principles really are interconnected."

I'm certain that many truths in the world are indeed interconnected. That part is correct. What's wrong is how we use "interconnected."

"Interconnected" is a vague concept, vague enough for people to treat it as a shortcut. The reason it creates illusions is that it usually satisfies three conditions simultaneously:

First, your goal is A, but studying B feels easier. Learning to trade means facing losses, facing uncertainty, facing your own repeated mistakes. Reading classics costs nothing and even gives you the feeling of "I'm getting stronger." Of course you'd rather stay in B.

Second, A and B do share a so-called "local isomorphism." Discipline, patience, following the trend, risk, probability... these words apply in any field. So your brain automatically takes the lazy route: since they're interconnected, the inspiration I got from B can transfer to A. Transfer is possible, of course, but it has a prerequisite: you must be able to convert it into actionable steps. Otherwise, "interconnected" is merely spiritual self-consolation.

Third, B gives you instant, intense, shareable pleasure as a reward. When you read a beautiful sentence, you immediately feel the comfort of "the world has been explained." You can share it in the group right away and receive resonance and applause. But the rewards of trading are delayed and uncertain: you can do the right thing and still lose money; you can do the wrong thing and still make money. So gradually you develop a more hidden preference: you start favoring things that "make you feel stronger immediately."

This is why "having an epiphany from somewhere else" is addictive. It's a low-cost, high-feedback, and quite respectable form of procrastination.

This illusion strikes even more easily in trading circles, because trading is so difficult. So difficult that we instinctively search for a safer, more sophisticated, more elegant substitute. Military strategy, philosophy, mental techniques, grand narratives, worldviews, life philosophies... as long as it's "deep" enough, it looks enough like an answer for trading.

When I first started learning Price Action trading, I was a severe case. When I wrote Price Action notes, I particularly loved making analogies with "The Art of War."

The writing experience was fantastic; the more I wrote, the more excited I got. Because connecting knowledge produces pleasure; it satisfies a kind of intellectual self-esteem. It felt as if I wasn't memorizing knowledge points; I was building a system. I wasn't learning a technique; I was grasping underlying patterns. I wasn't an operator; I was an insight-holder.

Until one day I suddenly realized: "The Art of War" never wrote about how to set a stop loss. It also never wrote about how to take profit.

Analogies won't bear our losses for us. I could use ten different "philosophies" to explain that "stop loss is the great path," but what I needed was a more plain, less romantic ability: when I should stop loss, can I actually do it?

This is the trap of "having an epiphany from somewhere else." It makes us more and more articulate at the linguistic level and more and more fragile at the operational level. We become better and better at explaining trading, and as a result, worse and worse at actually doing it. We win everything in language; we lose everything in the market.

At this point, the epiphany itself should also be "demythologized."

Here I'll quote Victor's explanation of epiphany: An epiphany isn't you suddenly receiving 100 knowledge points. An epiphany is when a system has 100 knowledge points, you've already truly mastered 99 of them, and when you fill in the last one, the previous 99 instantly connect in your mind, and you feel "I've had an epiphany."

The most important part of this statement isn't "connect," but "you've already mastered 99."

In other words, an epiphany doesn't skip the process. An epiphany is a byproduct that comes after the process is complete. If you try to skip 99 points and go straight for the "feeling of connection," what you usually get isn't an epiphany. It's illusory excitement.

And the even more cruel layer of reality is that even if we truly learn 99 points, learning one more doesn't necessarily produce an epiphany. Because human attention is limited, and forgetting is the default mechanism. We think we remember, but in reality knowledge is quietly loosening, falling away, disconnecting.

This completely punctures the "epiphany narrative": epiphanies are neither reliable nor worth pursuing.

Especially in trading, what we truly need isn't some moment of suddenly understanding everything, but whether, when we forget, get distracted, or experience emotional fluctuations, we can still return to the same set of logic and actions.

Trading is a reward system for "repeatability."

Epiphany is a psychological preference for "drama."

They are naturally mismatched.

So my attitude toward "I've had an epiphany" is now very simple:

Go ahead and have epiphanies. Have as many as you like.

But please bring the epiphany back to the thing we need to solve.

If the goal is trading, please be honest with yourself. No matter how deep our epiphanies from elsewhere, they won't automatically become specific trading actions. "Interconnected" is not a passport for randomly shuttling between different fields. Inspiration is not a real skill. A sudden awakening does not equal actionable execution.

I'm not against reading philosophy, military strategy, or the classics. Literature, history, and philosophical thought can broaden your world, make you calmer and stronger, and truly share common ground with trading. But if my goal is to trade well, I ultimately must acknowledge a fact so plain it's almost boring:

The market doesn't reward my depth of understanding. The market only rewards my executability.

Epiphanies shouldn't be pursued. They only happen after you've done the hard work you're supposed to do, like a gift that occurs naturally along the way.

As for "having an epiphany from somewhere else," it's more like gently running in place. It makes me feel like I'm moving forward, when in reality I've just switched to a more comfortable route and kept going in circles.

Instead of always saying "I've had an epiphany,"

it's better to say something more grounded:

"I did the one step I was supposed to do today."