People are doing things at a younger age with each generation. With the likes of Zuckerberg becoming the youngest billionaire, he seemed to start a trend. Which is actually kind of funny because the platform he developed is now used by teenagers everywhere to make some money. I follow lots of 19-year-olds on youtube who make a few million a year through dropshipping, social media marketing and other pursuits, some of the really good ones make online courses and do one on one consulting. Some have even gone down the Grant Cardone route and made online universities and have hosted conferences all around the world. And they are 19 years old! That kind of stuff was unheard of 30 years ago.
30 years ago, entrepreneurial teenagers had lemonade stands and traded baseball cards. Today, entrepreneurial teenagers rake in a few thousand a month or even a week, and they do it using a laptop. The laptop lifestyle is probably one of the most liberating business models out there. With a computer and a wifi connection, you can sell products to some idiot on the other side of the globe. You can make money while you sleep, I’ve even done that. Then we look at cryptocurrencies. The market is unregulated so anyone can buy into it, unlike stocks where you have to make a certain amount of money. The likes of JP Morgan will only accept big players who are willing to invest $1m+. There are so many stories of people trading Bitcoin and being able to pay off student debt (US). Crypto is the new penny stocks, although quite a lot of them have surpassed that criteria.
You can even see it on Instagram. Young kids are the doing shit that we do now. They completely skip the normal childhood experience and go straight into buying supreme or caking themselves in makeup. To me, it seems that we have a burning desire to grow up. And I know that older people will say ‘Enjoy your childhood while it lasts, growing old ain’t fun’, but it’s difficult to see that from a young perspective. Everyone wants to be treated with respect, and the younger we are the less respect we command from older generations. Ageism is real, but to be fair a lot of teenagers don’t deserve the respect that they want.
You see, lots of people try dropshipping and lots of people try crypto trading and lots of people try every form of online business, and most of those people fail. And they fail because they’re looking to make a quick buck. They think that they can set up a quick store on the web, which is exceptionally easy by the way, and then expect to make stacks and stacks because that 19-year-old on youtube said it was easy. And in comparison to starting a brick & mortar store, it is very easy, if the store fails, no prob start again. But it’s not as easy as they make it out to be, Making any money requires some level of expertise, and that can only be obtained through CONSTANT research and constantly making mistakes. And so when all these people try it and fail, they suddenly realise this and they quit because they couldn’t be bothered to put any effort into anything really. And they just keep looking for the next get rich quick scheme.
People who try crypto trading are enticed into it, by teenagers and college dropout traders who tell them on twitter and youtube that it’s easy. And not only that but they tell them that all it takes it a few clicks of a button and voilà, you’ll make profit from buying and selling ‘fake’ money. So these people try it out, and they put some money in, blindly of course, because no one wants to learn beforehand, and they play into their emotions and rush to buy crypto as soon as they possibly can. Some of them get rekt almost instantly, and call it a scam and go back to looking for the next get rich quick scheme. Others make some profit, mainly through luck, and then pump more of their money into it, and then get rekt because they have no idea what they’re doing. And then they call it a scam and go back to looking for the next get rich quick scheme.
Now I was actually one of those people. I put €200 on bitcoin when it was about 2.5k, this was back in August 2017 (back in the good o’l days). And after two weeks it pumped to over 3k, and I was making profit. And I felt like hot shit. Ho ho I had just made profit by buying some fucking digital asset while sitting on my ass. I, of course, knew very little about crypto and absolutely nothing about trading, so I didn’t take profit, because of my emotions getting the better of me, and instead, I pumped my entire life savings into it. The next week BTC went through a 40% correction and I got rekt. Of course being the noob I was, I sold at the bottom, and almost instantly afterwards, BTC decided it was time to start going back up again. Now I don’t want to come across as a pretentious cunt, although I probably already have, but I wasn’t going to quit after the market had just robbed me.
I decided to learn as much as possible about the technology and the community and trading, especially trading psychology. And after a few months of making mistakes, I suddenly got pretty good at it. After maybe 3 months I had made back all the money I had lost as a result of being an idiot, and then come November I started making proper money. I learnt a lot along the way, and most importantly I learnt that no matter how stuck our hopeless you feel, as long as you keep learning and have faith that you will become as good as the guys up top someday, then it will happen. And so now, after my first two online stores have failed, which cost me well over a thousand and maybe more (I’m trying not to keep track), I have faith that I will succeed. I’m not going to become another one of those idiots with no backbone or resilience, and just quit after the first hurdle. The race has yet to be won, and although there are lots of other hurdles ahead, the more I jump the better my technique gets.
I won’t let myself become anyone other than the guy I see in the mirror.
Cormac