TL;DR

The final result is all that matters in your pursuit of riches.

One can make millions of dollars, and lose it quicker than it was made.

If you snapshot a date before and after those events, the only difference in most cases is the experience of losing a ridiculous amount of money which is tens to hundreds of multiples of ones’ previous net worth, as being stuck in the casino most people forget to take any money out and subsequently continue to gamble it away.

It is also true and worse in the opposite case, when most people fall into large profits, they take out a bunch of money and fall into lifestyle creep, usually on the materialistic side when most money is earned purely from the casino — they extrapolate their earnings and assume they can continue their lifestyle based on that.

If you are not familiar with lifestyle creep, its when you spend more on your standard of living as your net worth/income increases, leading to former luxuries become necessities for you (e.g. someone worth $50K in 2023 spends $100K a year on rent on a Miami penthouse in 2024).

I entered Crypto some months after the Covid crash through the NFT industry, they were the meme coins of the 2021 cycle if you are not familiar.

I know at least a dozen people that successfully took out 8 figs in pure profit in the following 2 years, and I know dozens of people that lost 7-8 figures bag holding NFTs (that they still hold to this day).

In a bull market, everything goes up, you are more annoyed that someone made a 5X whilst you only doubled your money.

In a bear, everyone is just down -50%, -75%, -99% and is depressed.

The traits you develop in both market conditions which are widely different change your trading and holding patterns; view on money.

This is usually why they say 3 cycles is what you need to make it, the first cycle you (hopefully) make a lot and roundtrip, the second you are awfully careful and barely realise the gains being chucked around; the third you can switch in between both mindsets.

If lucky, 2, rarely do I see most people make it in their first bull cycle.

And yes this applies to any portfolio size, even more so if you made millions.

“The skill to hold a position from $1,000 to $1,000,000 is called “bad risk management”.

Nearly 99% of the people who can hold a position from $1,000 to $1,000,000 will hold it from $1,000,000 to $1,000.”

When you are successful in playing the casino game, in this case particularly meme coins, why would you try to learn anything else? [Whatever inning you think we are in right now, I’ve already seen memecoin peeps try to take their talents to lev trading and subsequently destroy their gains, so it is obvious we are closer to the end than the beginning].

Similar scenario to this in 2021 was NFT peeps trying to trade coins.

This is not to say, don’t, because in fact you need to adapt to market conditions, meme coins won’t last forever and we are already seeing the end of the stick in the recent launches and max 24 hour attention spans.

But play the game slowly, understand as much as you can, go into it as a newbie — not an ego-driven trader.

I dig deeper into this concept of levels which I think is a useful framework for any of you that have fallen into riches for the first time in this article:

Note: You can add a “.5” in between all of these levels which would cover the gap. “2.5” being you work one job and have a little bit of savings, but may not own a house. Etc.

The relevance to this post is that whilst you are still in the casino, you can withdraw chips to better your life, and you should seek to increase your level as you progress through this game of life.

From a tweet back in Nov 2021, which was the Crypto peak, but NFTs ran for close to another year^

It applies to everything. Becoming rich is one part of the equation, the second part is keeping it.

Some quick actionable things that may help you in the latter part:

• Continuously take profit, in times when market is down or is up
• Profit is only profit when sitting in a bank, chances are you will deposit stables to buy the next dip or shiny coin, withdraw and never deposit back
• Discount portfolio peak as a special number, it is fake, you will never realise that number, so don’t make decisions based off that
• Avoid lifestyle creep as much as possible, stay frugal
• The best thing you can do is pay off things (debts, a house, etc) to increase your level
• Identify how much of your gains is from luck, and how much is from skill, if you are not humble the market will humble you
• Don’t revenge trade, ever, you can zero out your port in one decision

Last but not least, if you survive, you eventually make it — so survive.

No trade is a trade.

You don’t have to enter every shiny play.

You can ignore the large P&Ls and not compete with others.

There is a scenario where BTC is $1M but people are broke even before the end of the cycle, that is when silly decisions are made, do you want to be that person? No, no one does.

Make Sure You Leave The Casino With Your Chips.

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