For me, profit is the main motivation for most traders. It's not the only key to long-term success. The often overlooked but crucial factor is risk management (this is very important), without this, even the most skilled trader can lose everything.
Managing losses wisely ensures you survive long enough to enjoy the gains.
Thank you for putting it rightly because the author almost mixed things up in a bit. From your reply, two things stand out which is profit and risk management as the key to long-term trading. While profit is the motivation for every trader to continue trading, risk management is easily overlooked and that hurt badly. So, to become a successful long-term trader, it is important to take risk management seriously so as to protect the capital and profits made on it. Without proper risk management, even profits will be lost together with the capital.
I agree that profit will be the main motivation for traders. But we must know that make a profit will not be easy so we must have a better skill in trading so we can get the chance to buy low and sell high. Many people forget or too lazy to learn especially about risk management so they use the all-in method in trading because they think when the price is down and they buy with a lot of money, they will make a big profit. That could be done if the market really reverse and increase to the high price. But many times we see the market is down and instead make us profit, we just cut loss preventing the big lose. If we can use risk management, we will not trade using a big money but will always analyze before enter the market.