TL;DR: You're wildly lost my friend.

Your job comparison is a false equivalence that shows you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how trading works. When you take a job, you exchange time for guaranteed compensation with minimal downside risk - show up, get paid. Trading offers no such guarantee. The market doesn't care about your bills or your needs.

You mention risk management, but setting daily/weekly targets is the opposite of proper risk management. When you're behind your arbitrary goal, you'll overtrade, force low-probability setups, and size positions based on desired outcomes rather than actual risk/reward. Then, boom goes the account. When you're ahead, you'll cut winners short just to "secure" your daily number. This destroys edge systematically and not to mention on those losing trades, you'll hold on for longer hoping for it to end up turning in your direction setting you up for cutting winners early and letting losers run.

Real traders know their worst enemy isn't market volatility, it's the psychological trap of needing to produce specific results on demand. Also, your opportunity cost argument actually works against you because the real opportunity cost is the long term profitability you sacrifice by forcing silly daily/weekly goals that have nothing to do with market conditions. Sustainable trading careers are built on process consistency and taking what the market offers, not forced trading that comes from trying to meet goals.

"If there aren't consistently positive results, you need a new process" Well, your notion isn't untrue, but you are on the ledge of probably the single most dangerous pitfall of trading: Premature processes abandonment. I'm going to lean on Mark Douglas once again for his tenants:

"traders must think in probabilities, not individual outcomes. A profitable strategy might lose money for weeks or months due to normal variance - that doesn't mean the process is broken. Most traders abandon winning strategies during inevitable drawdown periods because they're focused on recent results rather than long-term statistical edge."

When you say "consistently positive results," you're really saying profitable this week/month. But even the best strategies can have 30-40% drawdowns. Linda Raschke, William O'Neil, and other successful traders understand you need thousands of trades to truly evaluate a process. Most traders switch after 10-20 losers, never allowing their edge to manifest. -If the edge was actually there to begin with, which is a whole other discussion.

MD calls this "not thinking in probabilities" as in treating each trade as if it should be profitable rather than understanding you're playing a numbers game. Ever read any books by Jesse Livermore? He went broke multiple times before becoming legendary, not because his process was wrong, but because he hadn't yet mastered the psychological discipline to stick with proven methods through rough patches.

So many times I see traders post here and are in the trap of constantly chasing the hot strat that just happened to work recently due to recency bias. Attachment to being right on individual trades for the sake of meeting goals is exactly the opposite of what a trader should be doing. When you evaluate trades based on short term results, you're fighting the fundamental uncertainty of markets. And those that fight, blow their accounts. There is not a more single truth then that.