What are the NON-FINANCIAL standards that overrule, overpower and even overshadow every other consideration in your investment decision making? We all have them… and to know them gives you great power. I’ll tell you one of mine RIGHT NOW. I’m Bryan Ellis. This is Episode #176.----Hello, SDI Nation! Welcome to the podcast of record for savvy self-directed investors like you!There I was, laying in a lump. I was at a mommy-and-me gymnastics class with my then 18-month-old daughter because… let’s face it… daddy is more fun in a gym than mommy. Hehehehehe. But I was having no fun at all this day.You see, I’d taken on several affluent clients to manage their money. My oldest daughter is about to go off to college, so this incident was well over a decade ago. Anyway, I was laying there on the mat, not being any fun at all because… I was STRESSED OUT. I was worried and it had caught up to me. I was worried about one thing: losing my client’s money. There wasn’t an ounce of peace in my body.Now here’s the thing… I’d just had one of the best days of my trading life. At the time, I was trading stocks and options. And you know what? I was good at it. This was during the time when tech stocks were absolutely going crazy – back when Microsoft and Dell and Juniper Networks and Cisco and Oracle were the headline makers – and you know, I’d played the market like a Stradivarius. In fact, in one single day where the market made a massive, massive downward swing and then returned to basically even in the very same day, the report on my trading that day looked like I had the day’s newspaper in advance. I covered shorts at the very bottom of the market… I sold out longs at the top… I was firing on all cylinders. I recall a client watching my trading as it was happening and he called me – actually complaining – because one of the option spread trades that I’d put on for him had reached maximum profitability and there was no way it could improve further… even though we’d made nearly 400% on that trade in a matter of weeks… yet somehow, he was upset.So there I lay on the matt in my daughter’s gym… and I was a mess. I was successful… I had plenty of prospects for additional money management clients, and I had a track record under way that would have impressed anyone. But I was stressed out to the max. Life was still happening outside of my work, but I wasn’t participating in it.So I gave it all up. I told my clients I’d manage their existing trades to completion and would release all of their capital back to them. The stress was killing me, and it simply wasn’t worth it to me any longer.I didn’t make that decision lightly. It was then, and remains now, a dream of mine – a dream which, gratefully, I’m achieving – to use my skills to bring strong investment results to my clients and their families. And on the surface, I had everything I needed: The skill to create that result, suitable markets in which to deploy capital, and clients with plenty of money.But there was one other thing I needed that I didn’t know at the time that I needed: The right kind of clients. I didn’t know what “the right kind” of client was… to me, at the time, it was anybody who had at least $250,000 in cash that I could trade.By the way, this isn’t a criticism of the clients from back then. It’s a criticism of me, of my lack of awareness at the time about things of greater consequence than money and financial success.So for me, one of those NON-FINANCIAL ISSUES that overrules every other consideration is PEACE. I just won’t purposefully put myself – or my clients – into a situation that won’t let me sleep well at night, or that causes me to lose the use of my waking hours, and thereby causes me NOT to be present with my beautiful wife Carole or an of my four kids. I just won’t do it anymore… and I want clients who value the same thing.I’d like to tell you another story about that in just a moment that’s far more recent – within the past week, actually – but first, let’s talk about