I've been an entrepreneur my whole life. I had dozens of little businesses growing up from lemonade stands to lawn care to snow shoveling. When I graduated from high school I spent 6 years in the Navy so I could get business school paid for. I went to business school and found out it was bullshit, then changed majors to construction management. Now that I'm about to graduate, I've realized that school is mostly a big waste of time if all you want to do is be an entrepreneur. School teaches you how to have a job, not how to create them.
Throughout this ten year process that I thought was necessary to becoming an entrepreneur, I achieved one useful thing. I was able to accumulate a decent savings; around $100,000. I did this by being super frugal, buying and selling a couple properties, and investing a little in stocks.
So there I was with a hundred grand to my name and I pretty much just hung on to it for dear life. Then I found out about cryptocurrency. I started buying different coins in July of 2017. As the market grew, I accelerated my investments. By the peak if the market in January 2018, I had invested $5000 in the market and purchased a $4000 GPU miner. Then the market tanked. Then my miner shit the bed. My holdings went from $12,000 to $4000 in a matter of weeks. My $9000 investment had been cut in half.
But guess what? I WAS FINE! One thing I learned from watching my crypto portfolio fluctuate hundreds and sometimes thousands every day was to not be attached to the money. One day I'd be up $500, then down $1000 the next, then up $700 the day after that. This constant volatility of my finances drove me crazy at first until eventually I just didn't give a fuck.
So when my best friend and I started talking about starting up an indoor vertical farm, it really didn't seem that intimidating. We only needed to invest about $6500 each for six months of operating expenses. It seemed like we would most likely fail, and we still might. But we fucking did it. Neither of us had ever farmed anything before just three months ago. Right now we are currently selling produce to 4 grocery stores and 5 restaurants! It feels amazing to be running a legit business even though we are struggling to be profitable. I honestly feel like I am living by dream and I probably would't have had the balls to do it if crypto hadn't taught me to not be afraid of losing money.