Dealing with Beloved No-Coiners
I know that a lot of you have long given up on convincing your family members to invest in crypto, whether investing time in getting free crypto or money in buying it.
I myself have not been able to settle into that decision. I flirt with it sometimes, but ultimately I simply care too much about them thriving with me in the coming years. My faith in the industry is so strong that the idea of failing to get them to see the importance is untenable to me.
Archetypes
If you think of each person in life as having a particular archetype that represents their journey through the world, mine would be The Teacher. Not only am I really good at teaching just about any subject to just about anyone, but I also can't seem to hold back the desire to do so. It is my Being simply breathing itself into the world.
I'm such a good teacher that in high school I used to help my friends with their homework who were several levels ahead of me in subjects like math. I didn't understand the math they were doing, but I knew how to use the Socratic method to get them to understand it better themselves, so that they could solve problems that were stumping them for days at a time.
I'm such a good teacher that years ago I was able to succeed in a job all previous instructors in the program had failed at, teaching computer skills to lifelong felons who were entering the world of professional work for the first time. My students, who started with me convinced they couldn't learn because they'd never been able to before, ended so self-confident that they'd compete to be called on in spot quizzes. They yearned to demonstrate before their peers, and to me, how much they had mastered the subject.
Sometimes I would pass them on the street months after they'd finished the program and gone on to jobs, and they would brim with pride and joy as they gushed about how well they were doing in their new career. A couple times former students saw me on the street and just came up and started telling me how great their lives were, not even bother to say hello first. That to me is the most successful teaching: when you've adequately conveyed just how much you care about your students' thriving in life.
The Crypto Teacher?
Against this backdrop I place my desire to teach my family members to appreciate the opportunity of crypto enough to invest either their time or money in it.
Yet somehow I rarely can manage it. I have one sister and her husband fully committed. I have one nephew half way committed. I have another sister flirting with the idea and promising to dive in once she finishes a big move she's in the midst of. Aside from that I've got no real interest I've been able to stimulate.
I have gotten wallets onto most of their phones and sent them a little bitcoin, but unfortunately they all decided to take me up on that offer last Spring, and the market has pretty much just gone down since. That experience... seeing their dollar value go down 50% from when I first gave it to them... speaks louder to them than anything I can say.
And maybe that's the crux of the matter. Perhaps an appreciation of crypto's profit potential, with its 4 year bitcoin cycles, can only really be taught by time. You can expose people to the idea enough for them to notice what's happening with Bitcoin's price, but it is only their watching that themselves over a 4 year period that will actually teach them.
For some of us, it comes more easily to us. But aren't we appreciating more about crypto than just profit potential? We all want more buying power, of course, and I would actually put that as my top motivation. But we also care about things like censorship resistance, inability to be devalued by governments, and autonomy over possession and sending. You don't need to watch prices for 4 years to see the potential on those scores.
But I don't know that you can teach a person to value those things if hearing about them isn't enough to make them see value. What do you say to convince someone they should care about their government's ability to devalue their money if they say they don't care about their government devaluing their money? Seems a pretty self-defined value to me.
Now I know that a big part of it is a question of priorities. People who are dealing with needing to change houses and couch surfing for months with their kids in tow, well one can see how the behavior of the Fed wouldn't be a top priority. Same for a couple that's newly pregnant. Or having just bought their first house. Recovering from a car accident. Starting one's first post-college job. And so on.
When big events are happening in one's immediate personal life, issues with a longer term event horizon simply have less power to demand one's attention.
The issue is that a lot of people keep themselves in that constant almost-crisis-mode. They're always just barely holding it all together. Every time things start to settle down, they change jobs, change houses, do something to try to "improve" things in a way that just leads to more intense demand for attention to immediate needs.
What does it take to shift someone to a lower time preference, where they allow their life to be stable enough in the present for the long-term to take center stage?
Your Archetype and Your Crypto Relationships
Now there are lots of different archetypes that guide people's lives. Maybe yours is one that makes it easier to leave loved ones to learn on their own according to their own proclivities.
There are Leaders (who may only see fit to lead those ready and raring to go). Nurturers (who may not want to push people before they're ready). Heroes (who are likely to want to save people, but perhaps seeing no-coiners as guilty of irresponsibility and so not worth of saving). Lone Wolves (who simply don't care what anyone else is doing). And so on.
I don't actually understand other people's archetypes and related reasoning all that well. But I can see clearly that not everyone is going to feel as compelled to turn family no-coiners into hodlers.
How do you make peace with it?
What do you think and feel when confronted by beloved family members who just won't seriously consider crypto?
Do you worry about them?
Today I'm at a place of trying to figure out how I let it go. I think sometimes people have an inner compass that is simply tuned in such a way that they keep themselves in the same state of poverty or abundance no matter what opportunities lay themselves at their feet.
They have the inner guidance that when I try to get them to invest Dec. '18 they have no interest, but when it starts soaring 3x in May '19 they finally contact me wanting it now, now, now! Only to of course see it drop 50% over the next several months, to a place that would still be a 2x from last December. Even when they do the right things, they do them with the wrong timing.
How is a change in such a thing taught by another? How does even life experience teach it if the person isn't viewing their life through that filter? What if they are blind to the idea that they have an inner compass with its true-North calibration off?
You see, I am still searching for how to teach them successfully, even as I search for a way to let go of the idea of teaching them at all. LOL.
What to do.
