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This past week, I had one of the most serendipitous mornings of my life.
It was one of those moments where things align a little too perfectly.
And it’s a prime example of why you should never label events in your life as good or bad.
This story begins in early 2022 with my crippling crypto addiction, and it ends with an ancient Chinese farmer.
Sound weird? Good.
Let’s dive into it…
It’s Always Too Early to Judge
After spending the majority of 2021 glued to crypto charts, I entered the 2022 New Year at a portfolio all-time high.
By mid-January, I’d successfully turned $20,000 into $85,000 by trading risky altcoins.
Not bad for a 21-year-old still in university.
But being the inexperienced and greedy investor I was, I didn’t take any profits.
Naturally, I thought my coins would keep climbing. I wanted more.
And we all know how the market treats these types of people, right?
Over the next 2 months, I proceeded to disregard every single rule in the book:
I invested emotionally.
I fell victim to FOMO.
And overall, I deteriorated into a textbook degenerate trader.
By mid-March, I was officially in the red — down over $70,000 from my all-time high.
I couldn’t even comprehend the amount of money I’d lost.
I felt hopeless.
I cursed myself every day for the rest of that semester.
And I vowed to never return to that side of crypto again.
At that moment in time, I labeled this experience as bad.
How could it not be? I’d just gambled away life-changing money for no reason.
But fast forward one year to the present day, and I now consider this “loss” as one of the greatest things to ever happen to me.
I’m aware this sounds ridiculous, but hear me out.
Had I secured those profits, my life would be radically different from the one I live today.
And it probably would’ve been worse.
When my portfolio was at its all-time high, I vividly remember having plans to live out the rest of my life traveling the world and making a living as a crypto trader.
Thank God this didn’t play out.
Making money through an early lucky trade is the worst way to win. The bad habits that it reinforces will lead to a lifetime of losses.
That would’ve been a terribly unsustainable, stressful, and unfulfilling existence. And I would’ve learned my trading lesson eventually, so I’m grateful it happened sooner rather than later.
But what I’m most grateful for is the path it sent me down.
You see, losing almost all my money in crypto forced me to look for other ways to put cash in my pocket.
And this search led me to Money Twitter — a special corner of the Twitterverse where kids in their 20s make ridiculous amounts of money by building online businesses.
Today, I’m now one of these young internet entrepreneurs successfully earning a comfortable living online.
It still feels surreal. And the truth is, this never would’ve happened had I not gone through that traumatizing crypto experience (at least not so nearly so quickly).
Now, how does this have anything to do with the most serendipitous morning of my life and an ancient Chinese farmer?
Well, I’d been so busy working on my business recently that the thought of these crypto losses hadn’t crossed my mind in months.
But just a few mornings ago, I was on a weekly catch-up call with one of my ghostwriting clients.
He’s deep in the crypto world, and he briefly mentioned something about an airdrop on this crypto blockchain called Arbitrum.
“Arbitrum?” I asked curiously.
That was the same blockchain I’d lost all of my money on over a year ago.
Memories of all my time and money wasted there flooded my head once again.
I told him my story with Arbitrum, to which he excitedly replied by sending me the airdrop link.
(For those who don’t know, airdrops are basically free crypto tokens that a blockchain delivers to its early users as a reward. It’s literally free money.)
The next 2 minutes went roughly as follows:
I skeptically clicked on the link
Connected my crypto wallet
Saw how many tokens I was rewarded
Did some quick math to see how many dollars it was
Dropped my jaw and smiled in disbelief
Because of my (extremely irrational) trading activity on the platform a year prior, I’d been airdropped $6.2k worth of tokens(!)
All of which I quickly sold for cash (no way I was gonna let myself get sucked back into that black hole again).
This cool coincidence becomes even cooler when you consider:
I never would’ve heard of the airdrop had my client not briefly mentioned it, which would’ve left months of free rent chilling in cyberspace
The airdrop occurred just the night before, and the token is now worth half the value it was when I sold it
I dropped out of college and became fully financially independent from my parents only a few days prior
The way everything lined up still feels a bit eerie.
It’s like the universe just gave me an encouraging wink and pat on the back.
As if to say, “Here’s a little reminder, kid. A lot can change in a year.”
It was only a year ago when I beat myself up mercilessly for not taking those crypto profits.
Now I see this had to happen for me to build my online business, drop out of college, and now live life on my own terms.
Of course, $6.2k isn’t much compared to the $70k+ I lost. But the path it set me on was priceless.
The skill set, network, and business I’ve since built as a result of my crypto humiliation heavily outweigh any profit I might’ve secured.
I wouldn’t have wanted things to happen any other way.
That gift of an airdrop was a beautiful reminder of how this journey all started, and yet another example of everyone’s favorite platitude:
Everything happens for a reason.
What I considered soul-crushing a year ago, I now consider my greatest blessing today.
Keep this in mind the next time you feel like life’s out to get you.
Of course, I can’t help but relate this whole experience to one of my favorite stories — the Parable of the Chinese Farmer:
Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate. They said, “We are so sorry to hear your horse has run away. This is most unfortunate.” The farmer said, “Maybe.” The next day the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and in the evening everybody came back and said, “Oh, isn’t that lucky. What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses!” The farmer again said, “Maybe.”
The following day his son tried to break one of the horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg. The neighbors then said, “Oh dear, that’s too bad,” and the farmer responded, “Maybe.” The next day the conscription officers came around to conscript people into the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. Again all the neighbors came around and said, “Isn’t that great!” Again, he said, “Maybe.”
The truth is, you never truly know what the consequences will be of “good” or “bad” fortune.
Who knows, one day this airdrop might cause bad fortune in my future.
But then again, can I really call it bad? Maybe that will then cause something good later on down the line. And so on and so forth.
The butterfly effect is infinite and unpredictable, so I’ve learned it’s best not to judge things.
The best thing you can do is take everything in stride, follow your intuition, and enjoy the journey as it unfolds.
Amor fati — love your fate.
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
Walk the path that feels most natural.
And walk it silently, without judgment.
Matt’s Discoveries
My 3 favorite finds this week:
The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson & Lord William Rees-Mogg. I’m not finished with it yet, but it’s insane how accurate this book (published in 1997) has been in predicting the future. Moral of the story: stack Bitcoin, passports, and internet businesses.
5 Days in Mexico City by Kraig Adams. I’m loving Buenos Aires right now, but this video makes me want to check out CDMX soon. It’s a prime example of why Kraig is my favorite travel filmmaker on YouTube. I had the chance to briefly meet him in 2021 in NYC. Cool dude.
Sam Altman on the Lex Fridman Podcast. This conversation with the CEO of OpenAI was wildly illuminating about where the future of artificial intelligence is headed. The industry is moving at an alarming pace, and these 2 hours made me certain we’ll be living in a radically different world just a couple of years from now. What a time to be alive.
Thanks for reading, my friend.
Until next Monday,
Matt Mic
P.S. For those of you who want to take this full-time creator thing seriously…
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