On Sunday, 60 Minutes ran an extraordinary piece on Super Bowl champion Drew Brees.

Toward the end of the segment, the following exchange took place between Steve Kroft and Brees:

We asked Brees if he would give us a demonstration of his passing accuracy for our cameras. And he accepted the offer.

The challenge was to see how many times he could hit the eight-inch goal post crossbar which is ten feet off the ground from a distance of 30 yards.

On this day, Brees wasn’t perfect – he hit the crossbar a number of times and his misses weren’t very far off. But he failed to live up to his own expectations and he wasn’t happy about it.

“Low. Not my day,” Brees said. “Nah. That was terrible. You got me on a bad day.”

“I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it,” Kroft said.

“Yeah, Brees said. After a long pause, he added, “I will.”

Last night, we had a very similar exchange during our final evening Jellie training session together when I explained that I was beyond upset that I’d gotten into one particular sequence much later than I should have given a momentary distraction, which ended up being very costly.

Not costly in terms of lost capital .. rather it was costly in the context of a missed opportunity which required I enter the trade later than I would have preferred, giving up 2 points in the process.

And while some in the room told me to take it easy on myself, I vehemently disagreed, stating that it was completely unacceptable.

I went on to say that I expected to lose quite a bit of sleep over it … which I did as I played the sequence over and over again in my mind.

Fast foward to today where one of the Jellies took exception to another comment that I was planning to do everything possible to avoid “missing out” once again.

“Isn’t ‘missing out’ a bad motivator?” he asked.

To some, perhaps.

Yet, you see … I know myself.

More importanly, I also know my enemies … of which there are only two: complacency and satisfaction.

For these two foes reflect the only barriers that will ever cap my income.

So I have to find ways to make myself constantly uncomfortable … especially during sick streaks such as the one I find myself dealing with right now.

The common rule of thumb is that fear, anger, revenge, and extreme disatisfaction with one’s performance are counter-productive.  Not to mention the self-cursing.

Yet I’ve never marched to the “common” beat … nor do I plan to.

For me, they’re all powerful motivators.

In terms of yesterday’s trade, I essentially missed hitting the crossbar with one of my passes.  Forget the fact that most hit the bar … that one miss was unacceptable.

And in terms of today’s trade, I simply wasn’t going to let it happen again.

Three hours of sleep and 11 full hours of trading later, the result was a personal record 27 for 30 (sequences) day, including two with identical setups to the one I’d suboptimized on Monday, and five long exits within two ticks of oscillating highs including the final late-day exit at 1145.75.

The record will show that over the past many weeks, I’ve been trading at an even stronger consistency clip than the mega-zones in 2001, 2004-05, and 2008-09, and I’m as dialed-in as ever.

Yet from my perspective, it will make my work in the coming weeks to retain the current edge all that much harder.

Tonight’s agenda?

To review those three sequences to determine what went wrong.

And to believe that today was the worst day of my trading career.