No Luck, Just Mad Skills

If you don't know by now, I find lots of things interesting, but I tend to concentrate on human behavior and thinking process - not because I am some expert in the field, but I just find it fascinating how we as humans can have such a variation in the way we perceive and act in this world. This has become more salient since my stroke and I think that my interest has helped me observe, explore and improve in ways that might be different to the average.

Part of what I like to concentrate on is our ability to control our lives and this can be broken down into three general points we could think about - what we can control, what we can influence and, what we have no say over at all, where we are just a passenger. What is interesting for me is that in some areas, many people believe they can't control themselves or shouldn't in areas they actually can, and in others areas, they believe they can control it and they actually can't.

Luck plays a part in our lives.

Like it or not, a lot of our lives are dominated by luck, whether it be our genetics, the place we are born, who we are born to, the income bracket we are raised within or the culture that surrounds us - we control none of it. Later in life, we might be able to influence and affect some of it, but we are forever tied to our past. But, there are other sides to luck to, for example the "right place at the right time" conditions, where we may have had very little control of us being in the way of events, but we were.

Obviously, there is good and bad sides to luck, depending on how one looks at events and, looks back at events. However, none of us can control everything, and, none of us have no control over anything. One of the things we should learn to control is our emotions, something that a lot of people seem to think isn't within their power, so they inflict their emotions on those around them - while expecting other people to control their.

Yet, just as common is the way people look at their successes in life, as people tend to attribute good results to their skills, and bad results on bad luck or external influence outside of their control. I see this happen with crypto investors a lot where when they lose, they think it is not their fault and when they gain, it is their stroke of trading brilliance.

In a bull market, everyone is confident that they are awesome traders, after all, they are well up and "rich" on the good decisions they made in the past. However, come that bear, it was the market's fault. But it is interesting how many people think that getting wealthy in crypto is a skill, when the markets are highly unpredictable and there are many, many shitcoins to choose from. Peppering all with a few dollars isn't skill, it is firehosing.

However, some will claim to "check the fundamentals" of a project and I have heard this many, many times from people over the years but, those same tokens that made them rich, still don't have a product and other than people maybe speculating on it on the markets, many are dead. I know lots of people who checked the fundamentals of many ERC20 coins in 2017 and did really well from them financially - most of those tokens are now fundamentally dead.

I know other people for example who are claiming they are "stacking Blurt" because they have made so much money from it over the last year and it is a far better community than Hive because "no downvotes". Winner! Fair enough, today Blurt is up 47%!!! Fuck, I missed out!! I sold all mine when it started!! Damn!!

lol... 1600 dollars in volume.. and that is up 23% in 24 hours. I have traded more than that in the last 10 minutes probably. But the people who are looking at tokens like this, don't seem to understand the fundamentals all that well after all.

Like most in crypto, they are hoping for a massive pump on some nothing coin in the hope that they can dump. The funny thing is, that the higher it goes, the more they are likely to hold and push the price even higher, causing more hype. The dump will come. That isn't "checking the fundamentals".

And then, there are people who do actually have the technical ability to check the code, the whitepapers, the concept and make an informed decision on whether it is worth investing into or not. But, what is their strike rate come bear market - if the project doesn't survive and keep growing through the bear, its fundamentals weren't sustainable and it was just a fancy pump and dump.

Not only this, regardless of strong fundamentals, most projects are going to fail, because that is where we are in the industry and things are moving rapidly. Quality of idea, team and everything else actually matters very, very little in regards to whether a project is going to do well or not, and downvotes don't matter at all. It is all about luck. Some things will get the hype, some won't, no matter who is behind it.

And, picking which token it is going to be is all about luck too. But of course, a lot of people seem to think that because they made a little wealth, they are smarter than those who didn't. The world is littered with highly skilled and capable business people who had brilliant ideas, work ethic and means, *but no luck. For every highly successful unicorn company, there are thousands that are not - and that is okay.

It is a funny world, because we seem to focus on the pinnacle as an example as to why the rest are failures, without recognizing that they are extreme outliers, lucky to be where they are. But, we lessen the others who are dong well, just not as well. It is funny, I heard someone yesterday saying how great Elon Musk is and how his wealth is so much more than that loser Bezos. Really? That is the standard of success? lol - Fuck, No matter what we do or accomplish, we are all losers. All 7.5 billion of us.

But, people seem to think they are winners, right?

I am so smart because I invested and my coin got pumped to the moon because it is awesome and you know "fundamentals" and "all my research" I did...

You got lucky dude. Like all of us have the chance to in crypto at the moment. But, people don't like to attribute their monetary success on luck, because it breaks their view of themselves.

I will let you in on a little secret. Unless you own a massive percentage of the supply or coded it, you did nothing other than bought. What drove the price up was the very large holders (often founding groups) who are manipulating the market in order to syphon off their holdings and leave all the people who bought on hype holding bags in hope that one day, it will return. It won't - unless there really are fundamentals that make it more than a token and turn it into a business that people are able to trust.

Trust is a funny thing, isn't it? How many people are willing to sell their house and invest based on the fundamentals of a meme coin? Some have and maybe they did really well and are super rich. Remember Bitconnect? People trusted that enough too - despite all of the warnings. They had "checked the fundamentals" and it was a sound investment. Fools?

Just unlucky I guess.

Should people trust luck?

So much of our lives are dictated by what is outside of our control, even when we think we are making controlled decisions. Most of the time, we are not - it is just that for whatever reason in that moment, we choose to go one way over another. It could be that the breeze changed or we came across an article, or we bought the token because we like the name or the logo. Lot's of random reasons - none of them have anything to do with the fundamentals of the project. Most decisions are made without any deep research and are far more like choosing numbers on a lottery ticket. Luckily in a bull market, most win. Come bear time though, I hope they have cashed out.

And then, if they cashed out - what did the fundamentals they relied on to buy-in in the first place matter? If it isn't worth staying in, it was nothing more than a hype train coin.

For me, the tokens I am going to start accumulating more are the ones that have some use case or, are building potential business structure for the future economy, or support communities and experiences that interact with our daily lives. Maybe I will get lucky and some will go to the moon, maybe I won't - but I will at least be able to use what I own, rather than hold it for eternity in a wallet, hoping luck will come back my way.

It is possible to make luck though, but in order to do that, it takes work. Not many in crypto are willing or able to do the kind of work it takes to build a business in a new industry, so they hope they get lucky and rich, so they don't have to do something that requires skill. Funny isn't it? The really skilled people in this world don't want to retire early and stop working, they want to retire early and better use their skills.

But of course, there is no telling some people, because they look at their outcomes of success and go back in time to rewrite history as to how they got there, attributing it to their process. And, when they look at their failures in the rearview mirrow, their process was sound, it was just all the other things out of their control that stopped them from being successful.

People are fundamentally interesting.

Lucky for me.

Taraz [ Gen1: Hive ]