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Risk isn’t just a financial concept… it’s the lens through which your life unfolds.
I break risk takers into 3 groups:
1. Risk-averse
2. Risk-calibrators (smart, logical risk-takers)
3. Risk-addicts
Our childhoods tend to push us toward the extremes: 1 (fearful) or 3 (YOLOers).
Everything about my upbringing pushed me into No. 3:
- Stories about my dad’s fistfights with cops, how he got stabbed, shot at, thrown in the brig.
- Him plopping me on the gas tank while he cruised around on his motorcycle with a cig hanging out of his mouth (god, I loved that).
- Meeting salt-of-the-earth wildmen at AA meetings who told the darkest yet most incredible stories of desperation and redemption.
- Seeing people die young in shitty jobs or overdosing or driving drunk.
- Getting necessities through barter or haggling at flea markets.
- Climbing in a car and holding your breath (praying) when you try to start it.
In that sort of environment, you don’t even really consider risk because it’s infused into every layer of your life.
You’re clinging by your fingernails, one flat tire away from getting fired, losing your apartment, having to sleep at the homeless shelter (which my dad did more than once after my parents divorced).
Living with risk can make you open to anything that’s going to smash the existing order... that's because the existing order just ain’t working that well for you.
Then there’s the other side of the spectrum.
The people who do everything "right":
- They go to college.
- Get a job.
- Bust their asses.
- Clip coupons.
- Max out their 401k.
- Spend 20 hours researching cashback reward programs.
- And pray they can retire before 70.
They’re smart, hardworking people who’ve been sold a dream of stability… one that quietly extracts their freedom, year after year.
(The irony is this mindset creates perfectly docile employees who are expert at making their bosses wealthy.)
And they don’t realize how they’re just a couple hundred hours of financial education away from completely changing their lives.
I’ve been telling people like this about bitcoin for more than a decade. And they still get this condescending nervous look in their eyes… “that sounds really risky.”
Well, sure.
But what’s really risky to me is working some dogshit job for 40 years and planning to “live life” after that.
You don’t have to YOLO everything on risky investments, but not having any exposure to risk is intentionally choosing a lifetime of servitude.
Figuring out where you’re at on the risk scale and intentionally adjusting it is a requirement if you hope to live a truly sovereign life.
In my case, that means reining in my risk-taking (avoiding casinos, max-lev perps and margin, for example).
In your case, maybe it means reading The Bitcoin Standard (or at the very least the Wikipedia page on bitcoin) and starting to understand how governments use currencies to manipulate you... to keep you on the hamster wheel (via inflation and interest rates that impact everything: your car payment, your mortgage, your credit card purchases, vacations, payday loans, your 401k, etc.).
In the words of Thoreau, "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
You could be one risk away from changing your fate forever.
Or you could wait. And hope that someday, somehow, the world decides to risk itself for you. 3 replies
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