Easy Come, Easy Go: Understanding the Universal Law of Money & Success

There has been so much wealth created in the last few years in tech and crypto. I’d go even further that in tech we’ve had a crazy run over the last 13-14 years. But now we are seeing the other side of this boom. The painful bust. Lots of bad habits to unlearn. 

In some ways it’s like winning a lottery ticket. Many of these folks end up losing the money and end up poorer than they started with. I admit the same thing happened to me, I’ve been pretty stupid with the amount of money I’ve made and wasted. 

In some ways, the same thing happens to super wealthy people. If you do very well, wealth sometimes hides you from the reality of the market. You have resources to fulfill and dull all your senses. 

This is like the money law of “High School Hero” Syndrome. The people who did well in high school like being the captain of the football team & class valedictorian etc etc, usually don’t do well in University or even in life in general, because they peaked & stopped learning. We all know people like this. 

It’s like a curse to have a lot of success too early in life. You end up drawing the wrong conclusions. Lesson from Carol Dweick, that you develop the wrong mindset. If you are told you are successful because you are smart, you stop taking risks as you don’t want to make mistakes that will threaten that image in your brain. 

This causes you to stop growing. You stop learning. This is death as an investor, and death as an individual in our ultra competitive and rapidly changing world. 

The people who are able to keep their money are ones who earned it through hardship and having gone through lots of ups and downs in life. There are folks we see as “overnight successes”, but if you dig a bit deeper you can see how long it really took. Usually 10-20 years at least. Any bigtime Hollywood star you know, did a crazy number of casting calls and suffered through a lot of rejection before hitting it big. The founder of Instacart, that was his 8 or 9th startup. Many of the Unicorns in my portfolio struggled for 7-8 years before they got there. 

The big success stories we will hear about in 5 to 10 years are toiling in obscurity right now. 

Good stuff takes time. There is no way around it. So be ambitious, be aggressive but also be patient. Be resilient and stay in the game. Long term thinking is the only way to win and keep it.