Do the hard scary thing

How voluntary hardship saved me from misery and made me a better trader.

This weekend, I went away with some high school friends and climbed a mountain for the second time. The experience led me to reflect upon the past few years of my life and the decisions I've made.

I am, and have always been, an incredibly lazy person. And to be honest, that's something I’m pretty thankful for. Out of lack of motivation to do difficult things I’ve constantly looked for shortcuts.

In some areas of life this has been extremely beneficial. I learned about the FIRE community by googling how to get rich, so I didn’t have to spend 60 long years toiling away at an unfulfilling job.

That research eventually led me to starting many unconventional things that required very little relative effort, but had high payoffs.

First came spending a few hours each weekend at car boot sales, buying whatever old collectible games I could uncover. I'd take them home, test they worked and sell them on Amazon for a profit.

I opted to do this whilst at university instead of getting a typical job like a normal student would such as working in a shop or in a bar. Wanabee Gary Vee me was doing quite well and earning a reasonable wage considering the low effort required.

A few years later, I levelled up my approach when I discovered Matched Betting. I realised I could make as much as my first "proper" job's salary by spending a few hours each evening taking advantage of bookmaker promotional offers and conducting arbitrage across exchanges.

Eventually this led me to Crypto where I was able to start out stacking some small amounts of sats, before eventually discovering NFTs, Airdrops and Crypto Twitter. 

It wasn’t long before I realised this meritocratic environment was one where I truly thrived and once I discovered the financial upside was many multiples of what I could earn in any corporate job my mind was made up. It was time to go full time Crypto.

Luckily, my early obsession with FIRE and my aversion to hard, meaningless work had helped me build a good savings buffer. So, the decision to leave the career I had worked hard to achieve became somewhat easier.

My bosses were perplexed by my choice. I had just been put on a talent management fast-track scheme and was the youngest person in the company to ever be put forward for this position. So when I told them I was leaving halfway through to trade digital images of monkeys on the internet, they looked at me as if I had just kicked their dog in the face.

What they didn't realise was the immense pressure I had put on myself to succeed in that job, coupled with almost a decade of pushing myself to the limit with various side gigs and failed business ideas. It had taken a toll on my mental health, causing disrupted sleep, heightened stress, overthinking, and panic attacks. I was secretly in a terribly fragile mental state.

The decision to leave was not just about the financial potential but also about escaping the mental burden that the corporate job had imposed on me.

In hindsight, the way I was living and the shortcut optimising has been both a blessing and a curse.

The blessing was the monetary advantage the desire to not work until 70 gave me, but the curse is highlighted below in just some of the many hundreds of examples I could draw from to explain the downsides.

My obsession with "side hustles" led me down a dark path of neglecting friendships as I pursued my full-time career. In the early days, I would turn down fun outings, sports events, barbecues, or parties to stay inside, focusing on finding new edges in sports betting or seeking a 0.1% fee reduction for an index fund I might invest in. Yes, I was profitable, but I became boring, lacking sunlight, and had nothing interesting to discuss with other normal humans.

I let my diet slip to appalling levels. I remember when I went food shopping for the first time with my girlfriend, and after going down three or four aisles with her and putting exactly zero items into the basket, she asked, "So, where do you get your food from?"

It was mildly embarrassing to tell her that, until that point, I had sustained myself solely from items from the party food section, microwave meal aisle, and takeaways.

When I was 18, I distinctly recall making the decision that waiting in a ten-minute queue to schedule a retest for an exam I had failed was too dull to endure. Instead, I chose to leave early, and go to the much more interesting McDonalds instead.

The consequences of my foolishness swiftly caught up with me as karma struck back. Upon receiving my final grades, I discovered that I had missed the A grade by just one mark, which resulted in my rejection from the university I had originally wanted to attend.

In Crypto, I found myself doing it too. Finding myself spending countless hours lazily sitting in Discord chats, waiting and hoping that some grain of alpha would fall my way. I would justify this to myself as "work," but in reality, it was a hugely unproductive waste of time. I knew deep down that simply reading and analysing various market metrics would provide far more edge that was not solely luck-based, but that required hard work. So I frequently found myself skipping that part of my day.

In all my ramblings above, I nearly lost the point of this original story, but anyway, back to the point.

During the summer of 2021, I climbed the aforementioned mountain, one that was not remotely difficult for most people. But halfway up, I honestly thought I was going to die.

Years of sitting at a desk, fast food, and compounding bad decisions later, there I was, bemused at how my previously able body was incapable of completing what amounted to a mildly strenuous walk.

It was a real wake-up call to me at just how far I'd let things slip. Usually, you'd feel pretty happy after completing a hike, but I just felt ashamed.

Some months later, I was diagnosed with some semi-serious health complications, and my brain tricked me into letting that be the excuse for why I was the way I was. I could justify this to myself to continue optimising for comfort because what's the point in trying hard if I'm destined to be sick regardless?

Soon after that, the bull market ended, the highs turned to lows. I quickly realised that the anxiety within my brain was not solely caused by my previous corporate job, and my visions of life without it were not as rosy as I had dreamt about.

I was one of the lucky ones; thankfully, I'd spent huge amounts of time listening to experienced people from previous cycles, so I was able to take some amount of profit. But even still, the stress of operating full-time in Crypto plus my poor physical fitness, diet, health, and self-inflicted isolation left me lower than I had ever been before.

It was at this point that I discovered what they mean when they say money doesn't buy happiness.

Somehow, though, more by luck than judgement, I stumbled upon some podcasts featuring successful individuals who openly spoke about mental illness, depression, and anxiety. I realised that feeling this way, despite success, is actually sometimes quite normal. If these people who had achieved infinitely more than me actually felt worse than me, then maybe I wasn't so weird after all. Maybe there was a way out of this.

It was then that I realised I needed to do something about it immediately as the Game Theoretical part of my brain began calculating that the probabilities of me continuing to spiral into a worsening mental state, likely culminating in my eventual non-existence, were significantly higher than zero.

The way I decided to do this was by embracing voluntary hardship. Basically, forcing myself to do literally anything that sounded difficult or challenging, regardless of the level of discomfort.

I know this sounds like something one of those Instagram influencers writes as the caption of a picture of an alarm clock at 4 a.m., and like me, you're probably thinking this is stupid.

But in my experience, it's been the thing in life I am absolutely most thankful for.

The first thing I did was delete all my social media apps, got on a plane, and went traveling alone for three months, visiting multiple countries, hiking, solo camping, and experiencing new things. While you might think, "That's just a holiday, how is that hardship?"—you'd be right. It was super fun.

But there were aspects to it that were immensely challenging to me personally. The past two years before that trip, I'd barely left the house. A diet of negative news articles, an obsession with Crypto trading, and the built-in paranoia you develop as a result had left me with somewhat crippling social anxiety. So being forced into having to interact with random strangers to prevent complete isolation was a challenge to me.

The upsides to this were absolutely huge. Not once did I check the prices of Crypto. I soon realised that people are mostly just super friendly and welcoming and that the news 100% does give you a negative unrealistic perception of the way strangers are. No, not everyone is an axe-wielding murderer waiting to rob you.

I also realised that basically nobody normal cares one bit about Crypto. Not once did any random person I met mention anything even close to resembling this space. This was super refreshing as at times I'm sure we all get bogged down in the negative news things like FTX, Luna, or even politicians' comments cause on the perception of the space.

I returned refreshed a few days before FTX blew up. Sadly, I had a small amount of capital in there, which I've written off as lost forever, but weirdly, it didn’t bother me at all. My anxiety levels were trivial compared to how stressed I'd get previously at even the most minuscule of events.

Taking a significant hiatus from this space had allowed my brain to reset and think in a more analytical manner and not an emotional one. As a result, I was able to remain calm and actually start buying a decent chunk of Crypto, realising that this was probably Crypto's Lehman moment and a great buying opportunity. If I'd have stayed in my room for the prior three months watching the charts for 16 hours a day, I am certain I would not have been in the mental state to start buying.

The idea was originally given to me in this talk by Stanley Druckenmiller where, after a large loss, he traveled to Africa, ignored all TV, news, and stock prices, and reset his mind, then returned back and hit one of the biggest wins of his investing career. He is one of the greatest investors of all time, and if taking a break and ignoring all forms of news works for him, then it'll probably help you too. It certainly helped me.

I decided to push myself even further by embracing more voluntary hardships. Despite my hatred for running and the fact that I couldn't even jog for more than two lampposts in distance, I dared to register for a Half Marathon. Surprisingly, four months later, I found myself limping across the finish line, and now I have already made plans to participate in my first full Marathon early next year.

I joined a gym and committed to lifting weights three times a week at a minimum and decided that all my food shopping would be done by cycling there and carrying it home in a backpack. Despite owning a perfectly capable car, I've found that I much prefer this way of life. It takes like two minutes more to do, but I get the health benefits that come with it, and overtaking people stuck in traffic on your bike is FAR more fun than being the one sat in said traffic.

I named my internet character Happpy because it reminds me that happiness is a choice and one that is fully within my control. I made a conscious effort to interact with and learn from people in the space, to contribute and to give back and to focus more on avoiding participating in the circus that is observing Crypto Twitter.

Sausage rolls became salads and Mcdonalds became meal prepping as I realised bulk cooking once every two weeks solved my bad diet. A few hours on a Sunday spent cooking healthy meals is not my idea of fun, but it is tolerable. I can then spend about 0.1% of my mental energy each day heating up my pre-cooked health filled meals rather than realising at 7pm my fridge is filled with nothing but chocolate and regret filled leftovers from last nights takeaway.

This blog is a form of voluntary hardship. I enjoy writing, but signing up to write once per week and finding something mildly interesting to talk about is challenging. So setting the mental target of doing it for a year has been an experience.

But the upsides have been huge—so many of you reading this have reached out to me to share ideas, say thanks, or comment. It can feel pretty embarrassing at times being associated with Crypto for employment, so this feedback makes me feel like less of a loser and more of a useful, functioning member of society.

So this weekend when I reached the top of that same mountain with ease, my feelings were one of relief.

I had made progress.

I realised that I feel stronger, fitter, more mentally sharp, and emotionally strong, and I've seen that in my Crypto trading too. My decision-making is better, and my willingness to sit down at a computer and do the boring work that makes the actual money is significantly ahead of where it was a year ago.

I'm not perfect by any means, I still mess up a lot and slip back into old bad habits, but I'm trying. I know how to course-correct when things start to go astray, and I'm committing to trying to improve for the remainder of my days because choosing to do difficult things day after day makes you better prepared for the truly hard challenges that life occasionally springs on you.

I hope this post doesn't come across like I'm some dollar store David Goggins because my achievements so far are basically reverting back to being a normal human being, and most people won't find them noteworthy, but hopefully, someone out there finds value in this.

And even if not, typing this out onto a computer is a good reinforcement technique to remind myself why I need to go for a run tomorrow even if my legs hurt because they are very sunburnt because I'm an idiot who left his sun cream at home and did a five-hour hike on the hottest day of the year so far.

Have a great week!