The Simulation of Life Explained
Level 2 - Value Investor
Welcome Avatar! We have provided several posts that explain how the path to get rich works. Depending on where you are, you’re either 1) trying to get a career on Wall Street/Sales/Technology, 2) building an online business or 3) attempting to scale out your online business. One of the major issues we’ve noticed is that most people are too busy planning vs. taking action. This is 90-95% of the battle. If you’re simply making elaborate plans we have some bad news. You’re not actually planning. You’re *Daydreaming*. Since stories are quite persuasive we can use visual imagery to help you understand why.
The Basic Simulation Concept
When you’re born, you don’t get to choose your starting point. Some lucky people are even born straight onto DeGen Island 2035. Nearly zero percent shot at failure. Think being born into the Trump Family, The Koch Family, or the Walmart Family (at this rate being related to Michael Saylor would fall into a similar category).
Instead of complaining about this, which most people do, you get to carve out your own path to the promised land.
The above world map has three general starting points. Most of you are American and would start on the left with a goal of making it to DeGen Island 2035 USA, others in Asia/Australia with a goal of making it to DeGen Island Asia 2035. And. Another set of people in Europe/Africa etc.
When you start out in life you’re effectively a Jet Ski. You get to move fast and change directions quickly. Then you graduate to a Speed Boat. This turns into a small cruise ship. Which turns into a Cruise Liner. Which finally turns into a massive container ship.
Age 0-18: You can make a ton of mistakes in this range with no real major issues. As long as you don’t do anything insanely foolish, you might even be able to see more than a few potential life paths. If you don’t like them you simply turn around. In this age range you should spend nearly 100% of your time figuring out what you’re good at.
Age 18-30: At this point you should have at least *one* thing you’re good at. This leads you into one of the careers: Wall Street M&A, Technology or Sales. If you didn’t find any skill in this time frame? Just choose sales. You don’t need to know anything about M&A to be successful but Sales is a life long skill. You sell yourself for dates. You sell yourself for getting your first career/job. You sell yourself every single day.
Age 30-40: By this rough range you should know how to combine a few skills which allows you to generate a lot of income for your age range. If you still haven’t figured it out, you’re still a relatively light weight boat. You likely have *some* responsibilities. By the time you’re at the high-end of this range, the boat gets heavier and heavier and heavier with more responsibilities.
Age 40-55: Generally speaking, your path is pretty set. We’re pretty optimistic on the future given all the changes we’re seeing in Web 3.0, E-commerce and other industries. However. The motivation aspect begins to wane here.
Lots of reply guys will always find some success story of a guy in his 50s making it suddenly. The reality is that the younger you are the better your chances. Why? You have more time to keep adjusting, iterating and improving at a rapid rate.
Age 55-70: You’re pretty much done here. At this point we’d say there is no real reason to change your lifestyle/set up. The one thing you should do here is learn about the future so you don’t lead your kids astray (if you have them).
We remain shocked/impressed by the small number of older guys who actually figured out the information here was legitimate. Shows an enormously open mind and interest in learning. Most give this up at age 40 or so. Congrats to you guys for making sure you don’t pass down dated ideas/business models.
“Follow Your Dreams and Plan”: Good luck. You aren’t even heading to the shore you’re simply treading water as your arms and legs get tired. No one has a passion for Porta Potty Rentals, Shoe Laces or Odor Sealing Cat Litter. Those are all massively profitable businesses. The only time you should “follow your dreams” is if that dream is 1) in a profitable industry and 2) you are good at it. Most forget *both* parts.
Kill Your Ego, Hack the Simulation
Ah yes. One question we got during some of the paid Q&As was related to how/why we’ve identified high quality items across various topics.
The answer? Billions of failures.
Once you realize you are not good at something you simply move on and avoid swimming up stream. While “sports ball” is a fun joke for people who sit around rooting for a home team, it does create an immediate feedback loop. A good example.
Sports: When you’re a kid (before video games took over), you try to figure out what you’re good at. If someone was “the best player” at their high school (one sport), the truth is that they were not that good. Not being rude here. Just stating facts. Collegiate recruiting doesn’t even begin at that level.
In the sports world, there are really three levels: 1) level one is in-shape and training 3-5 days a week, 2) level two is able to go to college for the sport and 3) the final level which is professional.
It’s pretty clear cut in that regard since there is *no economic value* unless you can go to college or you can become a pro. At this rate (with colleges becoming less relevant), you’ll eventually only have two levels: Pro or Not Pro.
The result? You’re forced to kill your ego at age 14-18 if you’re smart. If you’re not good enough at a particular sport you simply quit and switch. If you are only good at one sport but that is enough to send you to college, you should go all in on it. Use it. Leverage it. Get that preferred schedule treatment and milk it for all it is worth.
In short, the earliest ego death you should experience is related to physical endeavors. You have to learn that there are people out there who are significantly better than you… to a point that it is quite honestly embarrassing. (don’t be the has been that “coulda, woulda, shoulda” if he “worked hard”. The guys who openly lie to themselves.)
Next Step in Ego Death: Assuming you’ve passed this step, it becomes a lot easier to recognize talent when you see it. This sounds ridiculous. And. It is true. We really believe that understanding your own physical limitations (compared to elite people) is quite eye opening. It forces you to be self aware.
The next step is removing the Ego once again and saying: what kind of skills do I really have. As a point of emphasis, what you’re told by “Academia” isn’t the answer. Academia just means you regurgitated a bunch of stuff you were told. Rule following.
For fun we can use our own writing style as an example: 1) it is incredibly blunt & aggressive, 2) it doesn’t ramble and 3) it is off putting in a social environment. If you want to make friends, you don’t type/talk/write like this. You want to transfer positive feelings of happiness at all times despite what you actually think: hence our long-standing tag-line of “Smile, Nod and Agree”.
The good news about this typing style? The only people who will “put up with it” are people who want to get rich and people who hate wasting time (hint: they are typically the same). Winners are results oriented and don’t care much for feelings/tone. Losers need validation, gentle communication and other things that waste time. (Note: if you want the general public to like you, simply figure out what they want to hear and say it back to them in a nice tone/happy voice)
Turning back to you again. Sit down and do a self assessment. Walk through every single thing you’ve tried to do in your life (for the past ~25-35 years based on our guess of the average age here).
What are you actually good at? What industry wants a person like that? What industry *wouldn’t* want a person like that? So on and so forth. At this point you should be able to narrow down your choices to a handful of skills/ideas/groups. Then you move with aggression.
Still Confused, No Problem Go with Forever Green: If you went through and can’t figure out what you’re good at, look at the major industries that will never go away: 1) dating, 2) sales/inter-personal skills, 3) investing, 4) skin care, 5) diet and 6) anything else that people will need 100 years from now.
Learn any of those and learn it cold. If you’re going to go down the fitness path you better be ultra-fit. If you’re going to go down the skin care path, you better be good at selling your product to women in their 30s/40s (yes this means you should be reading and tracking websites and forums they visit). If you’re going to go down the investing path, you need an extremely long (and positive) track record and must be willing to accept next to zero growth for 5-10 years. So on and so forth.
The simple message? Choose any of those major markets and just start moving fast. Get your website up, start producing content on TikTok, get those units flowing and figure out the problems as they arise.
Example: You’re 25 and reading this? Go into something fast and simple 1) offer a consulting service or 2) start flipping a hot product like sneakers. Just start doing it. You’re going to lose a few bucks up front (true). The faster you get these growing pains out of the way the better.
Notice the typo in the word before. Don’t worry about mistakes as long as the major point is there the results will follow.
Final Step - Death of Attention: Unfortunately. You’re going to learn the hard way. Everyone does. Unless you’re an absolute monk. Or. Married your high school sweetheart and never drank. The chances of you going on a bender once you get past financial independence is nearly 99.9%.
On a BTB note, once you go through a bender with a hospitalization scare/fear the reality sets in. No one really cares if you’re successful and all of your antics were just cover ups for dopamine chasing.
It took a while to figure this one out but the “financial independence” dopamine hit is the largest one you’ll ever have (from a money perspective). To keep it simple, if you can live on $120,000 US Trash Tokens a year, does it really matter if you’re generating $180,000 USTT per year if you do exactly the same thing? There is a massive diminishing return aspect to wealth as soon as you reach Financial Independence.
Chart from Psychology of Well Being. The Point of Diminishing returns is financial independence. It can go negative if your lifestyle expenses cause you to go negative later in life.
Congrats You Made it: If you understand all of the above? Congrats. You’re probably one of our 5+ year followers who made it (Multi-US Token Millionaire). While we appreciate the thank you emails, the reality is that you did all the work. You already know that 99% of people won’t even try and will continue searching for lotto tickets.
Hopefully? You’ve decided to remain low profile. The fastest way to go negative and exceed the point of maximum yield is with a high-public profile. You’ll get a never ending email stream of “I know it isn’t that much to you man”, “Don’t you think you did too well”, “Don’t you think it was luck”, “You became a mean person” and “Must be nice”. Instead of attracting more of these, just blend into the crowd and have a “must know basis” for your beautiful home (anyone who enters will certainly spread noise).
Conclusion: Life is really about living with brutal truths. No. You cannot be the richest person in the world and the most athletic person in the world (highly unlikely). No. You cannot be good at everything. No. You cannot turn back the hand of time and fix the “shoulda, woulda, coulda” games of life.
The good news? Winners love this model. Why? Every single “No” gets you closer to the first yes. If you try 100 things the chances of all 100 being a no is next to zero. It is just a numbers game.
Cracking the “Code”
To leave with some seemingly contradictory advice, we’d like to help you improve your chances with a simple sentence. “Stop Caring About the Results”.
When the average person reads that, they think this means sit around and be lazy doing nothing. No. It means you should shot gun as much as possible and let the chips fall.
Notice? The guy who needs money the least tends to attract even more money. The guy who doesn’t care about getting the girl at the bar? He usually get the girl. The guy who has a smile on his face after the 50th sales call that ends with a no? He usually ends up being the head of sales later on.
The single thread that connects all of these “coincidences” is not caring about the *result*. If you care about the end-result the end-result is unlikely to be positive. You end up focusing on things that don’t matter which drain valuable amounts of time from your pool of energy.
Simply stop caring about the result. Iterate. Repeat. Iterate. Repeat. The habits you build will drive the results over the long-term.
And? Once you see something works, step on the gas.
Disclaimer: None of this is to be deemed legal or financial advice of any kind. Simply opinions written by ex-Wall Street Tech bankers who moved into affiliate marketing and E-commerce.
If you’re interested in making it to DeGen Island 2035 and want high quality content from multi-millionaires on crypto, e-commerce and the macro environment we strongly recommend signing up for the paid version which will cost less than a week of Starbucks at the current rate of inflation.
Final Note, Every Tuesday we give away USTT/ETH/BTC for various entertainment items on Twitter.
Life is so much easier when you stop playing the ego game. One thing I quickly realized is that literally every single person you talk to (this applies to everyone) thinks that they're better than you in one way or another. It's easier to just let them think that.
"Hey man, do you still have those bitcoin"?
"Nah, sold it a couple years ago at a loss."
"Are you making a lot of money with your online business?"
"It pays the bills but that's about it."
Let them win the ego battle and your life becomes a lot less stressful.
That's the beauty of the Jungle. We can talk about high-level topics and haters have nothing to focus their jealousy on. I'm just a starter fish that costs 87 cents at Petco with a bowtie.
"If you want to make friends, you don’t type/talk/write like this"
Oh, well this explains a lot