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.
This post is sponsored by Open Campus
Open Campus is partnering with Tether and Sorted Wallet to launch Africa’s first on-chain student finance program, starting in Kenya.
This is set to showcase student loans as a powerful new stablecoin use case—at a time when stablecoin plays are driving wild valuations across crypto.
This unlocks an entirely new usecase for stablecoins
This will onboard millions of people and bring billions of dollars into crypto
Funding real people, helping them, and generating real yield
One of the easiest traps to fall into in crypto is assuming that every move you didn’t take was a real opportunity you somehow missed.
You open X, see a bunch of people talking about whatever the hottest token of the day/week is, and your brain instantly constructs an alternate timeline where you absolutely would have bought it, held it, sized it correctly, ignored volatility, and exited perfectly. Not only that, but you treat this fantasy outcome as if it were part of your realistic opportunity set.
But that’s an illusion.
Most of the opportunities we think we “missed” were never actually available to us.
They were:
Outside our information flow
Outside our risk tolerance
Outside our emotional capacity to hold
and on and on
In other words: they weren’t our opportunities. They were someone else’s.
Crypto has an unusual property: gains are hyper-visible, and losses are invisible. People sure do love to brag about their wins and puff out their chests on social media.
This creates a distorted map of the market where winning trades seem common and extreme outcomes appear normal. Not only that, but the risks appear smaller than they actually are because you almost always only see the wins and rarely the losses.
Your brain then starts to create a narrative something along the lines of “I should have been in that token, ugh, how did I miss yet another big runner?! I suck!”
Aren’t human brains fun?
The reality is that the only opportunities that matter are the ones that apply to you:
Did you have legitimate rationale for missing the opportunity, or were you retrofitting the story afterward?
Would you have sized it in a way that materially changes your net worth?
Would you realistically have held through the swings?
Does this trade belong to your strategy or did it require personality traits you don’t have?
If the answer to any of these is “no,” then it was never your opportunity in the first place.
Once you see this clearly, most of the (infinite) regrets can start to dissolve.
Instead of thinking in terms of “missed trades,” think in terms of your personal opportunity surface, aka the surface area of your luck, and focus on increasing that. If you missed a lot of stuff but your surface area is tiny, you have no rational reason for ever thinking you should have found and taken advantage of those opportunities.
And remember, the market is infinite, but your attention is not.
Great performance usually comes from deep focus on a narrow band of opportunities that truly belong to you, not from trying to chase every lucky path someone else took.
Most missed opportunities aren’t failures.
They were simply never your opportunities to begin with.
Thanks for reading! In case you missed it, check out Monday’s post below 👇
It’s been a few months since I’ve done a portfolio update, and things have shifted around a little bit on my end so it felt like a good time to do another one.
