Luck, fate and predestination ( or how to land in a safe heaven and check for Wi-Fi)
Today I would like to talk about luck, and how some people get serious results overnight. First, I do not believe in luck, as it is, a dumb force, that strikes you when you never expect it, changing your life. There is no such thing, and while beneficial circumstances and opportunities exist, different people will react in different ways. What most people call luck, is in fact a result of long, grueling training, and every overnight success story hides behind years of hard work.
So, yeah, I get really worked out when people talk about luck. There is no luck, there are only used and lost opportunities. In crypto more than anywhere, this would be true. In the end, all that lottery effect was over-researched, and it states that people who are rich (and by that they mean people who have financial education) will stay rich, even when they lose all their money, and people who are poor, will stay poor (unless they learn about finances), even when they won the lottery. In fact, most of lottery winners are bankrupt in less than 5 years. Why? Because, even if you get millions, you will spend them unwisely, and sooner or later the splurge will finish. While someone who knows the budgeting and the financial staff can probably live their whole life making a profit out of one million dollars. There are exceptions, of course, but not so many.
Looking at my own example, and trying to track back how everything started. let's talk about a hypothetical situation. More than 12 years ago, I was reading about Tony Robbins, and as a result of that reading session, I decided to go to one of his seminars. Expensive as hell, I remember that it was something like 2 months' pay for a 4-days training, but looking back, it was totally worth it. It was the spark that started the FIRE. Yes, FIRE, with capital, as in Financial Independence and Early Retirement. Then, I started to look into budgeting, personal finance, and stuff like that. Checking out that now, my efforts were clumsy and inadequate, but this is how I learned. I become interested to keep the money that I earned with me. Same time or a bit later, MrMoneyMustache started his blog. I do not remember how I stumbled upon it. But back then there were only two notable blogs about personal finance. One was MrMoneyMustache, a guy who decided to retire before even he reached his forties, and the one with Early Retirement Extreme. Both followed and checked as soon as they published their new posts. I think their blogs may still be up even now, but the economical situation changed quite a bit in the last 15 years. So what was good back then, may need some updates now.
Anyway, this made me look into what I called side hustles. I started small. Some savings in the bank, with a good interest. I remember TSB bank used to have 4% or 6% for up to 2000 back then. Not anymore today. Santander also, has 4% for up to 15000, if I am not mistaken. I was doing surveys and Amazon Mechanical Turkey tasks (this one was only for books, all the monetary rewards from it were used to buy books, so I do not use my wages for it). Funny days, or nights, as I was mostly on the night shift, and I was using my free time to do MTurk tasks. I was also doing match betting, back then when it was really a thing. It worked for 2-3 years until the betting companies watched up, and start to shadow-ban you. I started to do like half of my wages equivalent doing match betting, and it was alright. For a while. Then, as this source of income dried out, I was looking for alternatives, and this is how I found crypto. Started quite early, probably in 2012, using Bitcoin faucets, and Litecoin a bit after. I remember that I managed to get quite a few Bitcoins, and I was so proud of myself when I did some serious profit, buying some on average for $60 and selling them at $280. Oh, the memories. Then some new cryptocurrency appeared, called Ethereum, and believe it or not, I bought quite a bunch of them with something like $20 each. Sold out with $270 or something like that. Made 10-12K out of it. Had a nice holiday and did some renovations to the house. And then, the wild 2017-2018 came. Boy, I was playing a game called 'scam the scammer' as most of the opportunities back then were mostly scams. They were operating like a cloud mining for a few weeks, and the rug pulled. So you will go with like $50, double or triple them in a few days, then withdraw it before they close the website. Some of this was going on for years, doing the Ponzi stuff. like HashFlare. My Etherewallet was a minefield back then. Ah, the memories. And at some moment around that time, I discovered a new game, Splinterlands. Well, it was Steemmonsters at first, and they were launching their Alpha packs. Played a few matches, lost them, and then forgot about it. Much later, as few people on my list were playing it and writing about it a lot ( @costanza and @chorock mainly), I started to play again, during the Untamed packs. Used some of the profits from match betting to buy some summoners and cards, $50 monthly, and kept playing. When they launched the land NFTs, somehow I ended with 200 of them. And at some moment, at the high of the bull market, my collection value jumped from $1-2000 to more than $30.000. Got lucky, as some will say, and then, by sheer luck, I discovered Leofinance. Luck, again, right. I had a blog for as far as I know, my first one dating 25 years back when I was writing poetry. Then Medium, for my health-related posts. Then Publish0x, maybe a few years ago, and read.cash, and the latest Hive.blog, via Leofinance, courtesy of @acesontop. So, I started to focus on this one, and last year, in December I reached a level that I would only dream of when I just started. I had 5000 Hive and 25000 Leo. But this is only the beginning. This year I will shoot for the moon, and I hopefully get 12K Hive and 30K Leo. And then someone will come and see my numbers and tell me how lucky I am. I know. This is the reason why I do not like the word Luck.
Wow, I did like to talk about myself, but now it is time to run to work. See you tomorrow!
George
