"The Money Game" is a 1976 classic by the pseudonymous 'Adam Smith', (commonly accepted to be George Goodman). Although somewhat dated, it's lessons and wisdom are still very much relevant today if not more.
If you don’t know who you are, this is an expensive place to find out.
Know Yourself
“The first thing you have to know is yourself.” This is paramount. The greatest traders all possess an unusually high level of self-awareness. The road to trading mastery is as much a journey in self-discovery, as it is one in producing high risk-adjusted returns.
What is it the good managers have? It’s a kind of locked-in concentration, an intuition, a feel, nothing that can be schooled. The first thing you have to know is yourself. A man who knows himself can step outside himself and watch his own reactions like an observer.
Art, not Science
"The market," says Mister Johnson, "is like a beautiful woman-endlessly fascinating, endlessly complex, always changing, always mystifying. I have been absorbed and immersed since 1924 and I know this is no science. It is an art.
The Portrait of the Investor
A series of market decisions does add up, believe it or not, to a kind of personality portrait. It is, in one small way, a method of finding out who you are, but it can be very expensive. That is one of the cryptograms which are my own, and this is the first Irregular Rule: If you don't know who you are, this is an expensive place to find out
The Necessity of Passion
If you are a successful Game player, it can be a fascinating, consuming, totally absorbing experience, in fact it has to be. If it is not totally absorbing, you are not likely to be among the most successful, because you are competing with those who do find it so absorbing.
Unreciprocated Love and Hate
All those marvelous things, or those terrible things, that you feel about a stock, or a list of stocks, or an amount of money represented by a list of stocks, all of these things are unreciprocated by the stock or the group of stocks. You can be in love if you want to, but that piece of paper doesn’t love you, and unreciprocated love can turn into masochism, narcissism, or, even worse, market losses and unreciprocated hate.