Welcome to another Nugget of Wisdom! A free post I send out once a week. These are designed to be short and sweet, a quick read to (hopefully) impart some sort of wisdom, or at the very least to get you thinking about something interesting.
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I have an addictive personality. It’s been with me my whole life. As a kid, I got addicted to chess, became obsessed with it, and got very good at it. I won the state championship for my age.
As a slightly older kid, I got addicted to video games, becoming obsessed with them. I got very good at them. Not quite competition winning, but amongst my friends, I was generally the best at most if not all games.
A little bit older, I decided to get obsessed with tennis. I was not an athletic child, and I had never really succeeded at much when it came to sports. But I got it in my head that I wanted to make the school team (8 people made the team).
I got addicted, and would play every free moment. At 11 years old I was waking up at 5 am and going down to the local court and hitting balls against a wall for practice, and pestering every family member to play with me any time they could. The school ran playoffs to make the team and I barely scraped my way into taking the 8th place.
Then came poker. In my final year of high school, I found out about poker and got obsessed with it. I bought books, read everything I could find on the internet, joined forums, and was fully addicted. That turned into my profession for 15 years.
I found crypto in 2017, but it wasn’t until I re-found it in 2021 that I really got addicted to it. Something clicked, and I decided that this was the thing I wanted to focus all my time and energy on. And by all, I mean all.
I inhaled as much knowledge as I could. Every spare moment was googling something, watching YouTube videos, listening to podcasts, reading twitter threads, and on and on. I found success in trading. Then I started creating my own content on twitter, and started this newsletter. I was again obsessed with content, and I found success there.
When I say obsessed, I don’t mean “I was super interested in it and thought it was really cool and wanted to make money and so I took it very seriously”. I mean I spent 18 hours a day, 7 days a week, for months on end, living, breathing, eating, sleeping, dreaming, nightmaring, and just all around allowing myself to be entirely consumed by crypto and content.
It was unhealthy. I didn’t have balance. My health suffered, my relationship suffered (my then-girlfriend / now-wife says she barely saw me that year). But I succeeded.
I say all this not to brag, but to show what it takes. I absolutely got lucky along the way, but I also believe that you can influence your own luck. Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. I prepared by obsessing, so that I was ready when the opportunities appeared — ready to identify them, and to capitalize on them.
It doesn’t always work out either. 2022 and 2023 saw me obsessed with ZenAcademy and building a business, running a team, and trying to find revenue and make that work. A combination of burnout, the bear market, and other factors basically meant that I failed in my efforts there.
I’m an alcoholic and was addicted to drinking alcohol for a long time. That’s a bad obsession! I was great at being an alcoholic, mind you, but boy is that not a thing you want to be great at.
I often get obsessed with other things and then give up after a few weeks or months. My ADHD brain loses interest, and I don’t succeed. That’s life.
Lately, I am obsessed with golf. I literally play 7 days a week. My instagram and YouTube algorithms are mostly golf related now. I’m starting to get decent at golf. It’s not the type of thing I’ll likely find crazy external success at, but it’s fun and rewarding and a pretty healthy obsession for a change (exercise + fresh air + socialising with friends).
I guess I wrote all this to say that I used to think my obsessions and addictive personality was a bad thing. In some ways, of course it was (alcohol, sugar, tv shows, video games). But in others, it’s been a massive blessing (poker, crypto, golf). Rather than begrudge it, I’ve learned to accept it. It’s neither good nor bad, it’s simply just me. And I’m okay with that.
If this resonates with you, maybe embrace it. Even if it doesn’t resonate, maybe the lesson of accepting who you are and leaning into your own strengths is one worth thinking about. Embrace whoever you are and stop trying to be someone else. We’re all unique, we all have our own superpowers, and we all have it within us to find success — whatever it is that success even means.
Thanks for reading! In case you missed it, check out Monday’s post below 👇
Thank you for your « Nuggets of Wisdom». I love reading them, there is a lot of truth in them.