Weekly Nugget of Wisdom #40

The importance of striking while the iron is hot

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 OpenGradient

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The importance of striking while the iron is hot

As someone who spent 15 years as a professional poker player and 5 years full time in the crypto industry, I have seen my fair share of highs and lows. Emotional (and financial) rollercoaster is an understatement. Months and even years where the money flows easily and I feel on top of the world, and then months and years where the opposite is true.

One of the (many) things that such a life has taught me is the importance of striking while the iron is hot. It seems like it should be an easy thing to do, but when the going is good, it’s easy to fool yourself into thinking it’ll stay good forever.

In the late 2000s, the online poker boom was in full swing. Companies were spending money like it was water in an attempt to acquire new users. One such company was PokerNews, a (you guessed it) news website, but also one that created poker training videos.

They reached out to me and said they’d like me to create some videos for them. They were paying $800 - $1000 per video, and each video only took me 60 - 90 minutes to create. I was making decent money playing poker, but my hourly rate was nowhere near those numbers.

Still, because there was friction involved in creating the videos and it was a mixup to my routine, and because I was still making pretty good money and it felt like I would be able to make that money forever, I was lazy, and only made a handful of videos in total.

A few years later when I was earning much, much less, I would have killed for the opportunity to make a few videos for $800 each.

The same thing happened during the NFT boom. I along with so many others were loving life, getting on whitelists and minting NFTs only to immediately flip them for thousands of dollars in profit. We were on top of the world, and it felt like these opportunities would last forever.

Most of us got complacent and didn’t capitalize as much as we should have while the going was good. This both means not taking advantage of all of the opportunities around us, but it also means not taking enough profit and saving money for a rainy day.

Some people are naturally able to strike while the iron is hot and maximally take advantage of these types of opportunities. In my experience, most people are not able to.

It takes hard work and discipline to continue to work hard and go above and beyond when you’re able to live a comfortable life by working less. But if you’re fortunate enough to find yourself in possession of a hot iron, I implore you, use it to strike.

Then strike it again and again and again.

Future you will thank you for it.

Thanks for reading! In case you missed it, check out Monday’s post below 👇