- Thread starter
- #5
User Power
Value/Post Ratio
599%
- Apr 19, 2015
- 99
- 593
What could go wrong going 150 mph in a rusty 23-year-old honda civic?
By now it was mid-March 2018 and it finally became too much to handle. The final semester of University was knocking on the door. Another thesis, company-projects, group works, final oral examination to finish the degree. My main “business”, which I didn’t push to grow further, was due to re-launch the first product on Amazon. With my second product being a failure, tasks for the first product to make up for it were due as well as general tasks that come with it: PPC campaigns, coupon codes, data analysis,re-ordering on time, market analysis, product sourcing, final preparation of products before sending them out. The question of where to live after University, where do I go, what do I do, can I sustain myself with what I do now? It all was staring at my face while I hammered away on my keyboard to push out articles about cryptocurrencies while still actively investing in ICOs myself. The stress levels were off the charts and now the last bit of sleep was gone. I would sleep for 2-3 hours a night usually would wake up to calls from DHL, customs or Amazon to fix some issues that were going on. Throwing in 2h worth of naps throughout the day to get at least 4-5 hours a day in was the norm for many months to come. On top of all of that, I saw LOADS of paper money disappear overnight as we’ve begun the free fall which would later be known as the beginning of the end. Way too many things were going on at once and I could barely sleep anymore. I’m pretty sure is the wrong word for what I felt during the time, it was more like a constant feeling of panic. Like your fight-or-flight response button being pressed over and over again. The stress level climbed to 99%.
It was disgusting.
April came around and I finally decided that I can’t continue like this. I couldn’t spend days researching and going through ICOs anymore. I couldn’t find the time any longer. So I started to automate it. This was a great solution and it put a real entrepreneurial flair to it as I would be able to take me out of the operative processes for 99% of the time. I went through 6 writers until I’ve found someone that did his research cleanly and understood the topics. I paid him $100 per article and the results were great. He lacked the technical understanding a little bit, but overall the quality was phenomenal. $2000 in token for $100 in fiat. Good deal. I designed a clear structure for every article so he wouldn’t miss anything. Once done, all I had to do was to format the articles and post them on my blog/twitter. It was a great system which only required 0.5-1h work a day tops, down from at least 5-6 hours depending on the volume I put out. It took some weight off my shoulders but I still felt something was off.
April passed and May came along. The automation worked nicely and I took up projects, forwarded them to my writer, received them a few days later, formatted and posted them on my blog. I had set up a money printing machine with minimal work, it felt great. Now, as the year went on, the overall crypto market continued to take a beating.
Bitcoin just bounced back up to $9000, but still, the paper losses were real and at this point I was surely down $100,000-$150,000 already. It sucked but I wasn’t too worried, I knew that the insane hype around Dec/Jan was not here to stay. I still believed in the long term vision and was confident in most of my investments. Additionally, the blog was generating a nice amount of (paper) money and I was on my best way to make $100,000 this year solely through writing.
Now, I haven’t mentioned it yet but I injured my shoulder at the end of September 2018. I wasn’t able to go to the gym at all and it’s the one and the only thing I REALLY need. As I kid it was football, as I got older it was the gym. I just need a physical counterpart to all the mental gymnastics during the day. At first, I thought it was my physical appearance that will suffer under the injury, but the mental aspects were WAY worse. Things were slowly but surely getting out of hand. The constant hyper stress paired with the lack of sleep and physical activity was killing me. Even after cutting back on the articles, stress levels didn't go down and soon enough peaked at 100%. I couldn’t handle it any longer, I have to pull the brake.
After laying off the researching and writing, I started to distance myself from the whole crypto space more and more. I just couldn’t do it anymore. It was eating up so much time and now University was in it’s finishing stages. The thesis was due at the end of May and I hadn’t even started 4 weeks before that. Additionally, the previously mentioned problems with Amazon kept getting worse and worse. The product was doing ok’ish, doing $4500 a month in revenue after I re-launched it in March. My main sales went through Amazon PPC as I directly marketed it as a premium product (and it actually is, quality wise). A competitor, however, decided that it’s ok to send some company-owned product test group participants my way to take out out every single PPC campaign of mine within minutes after I activated them. Not only burning through my PPC budget without mercy, but also wiping out 80% of sales within a month, now barely reaching $1000 in revenue. It went so far, that I got a badge of “Amazon Bestseller” with their company name + product title in it, probably because that’s the phrase their muppets had to look for before annihilating my PPC ads.
Now that the second thesis was due, I couldn’t do anything else. I shut everything off for 3 weeks and did nothing but researching and writing my damn thesis. It was an immense a waste of time but I just kept going, knowing it’s going to be the last useless thing I’ll have to do. I submitted it 10 minutes before midnight on the very last day. The final thesis was done, the last thing to do was to pass the oral exam in front of a committee at the end of June, 4 weeks from now. Subject matters: Everything we’ve learned in our 3 main subjects. I planned in 2 weeks to study, as I told myself if I don’t know the majority of the subjects by now I have wasted my time anyway.
I used the 2 open weeks of June till mid-June to keep up some crypto news again. I came back to another -50% of the majority of my holdings.
BTC was down to $7600 by then and I watched it crumble down another 20% to $6600 over the next two weeks. BTC is usually a good indicator of how the rest of the market performs. If BTC is down, everything else will be down as well. So this chart could easily represent my overall holdings, as I was probably down to $100,000 or even less since ATH.
I wasn’t it taking so lightly anymore. This was a lot of money, even though it was only on paper. I do however see it differently. It doesn’t matter if it’s on paper or not, having 100k on paper is as real as having 100k liquid, as long as you can actually liquidate the paper money anytime, i.e. not sitting in an illiquid asset. At any point, I could have pulled the trigger, liquidate my altcoins to ETH/BTC, transfer those to Coinbase and just sell it for fiat currency.
But I didn’t. Not at 300k, not at 200k and not at 100k.
What the hell am I doing?
I stopped everything once again mid-June and focused on my studies. As expected, I still recalled the vast majority of the subjects but I surely won’t risk slipping up. So I put my head down and studied for two weeks before I suit up and walked into the committee room to face the absolute final exam of my education on a sunny Friday afternoon at the end of June. The oral exam was smooth and I graduated one hour after I entered the conference room.
After being receiving congratulations of the committee I walked out into a sunny Friday afternoon. Nearly 3 years have passed since I first stepped into this very building. I stood outside and there it was:
Nothing.
Nothing and nobody.
All of my classmates had their exam the days before and nobody I knew was anywhere near. Everybody was back home and had already celebrated. By no means did I need to celebrate the graduation, as it has mainly become a side-occupation over the past 1.5 years, but I still very clearly remember the exact feeling of loneliness I felt on this very moment. I had a great relationship with a lot of my classmates and it being over just like that was a very weird feeling that I haven’t felt in years. I felt like someone pulled me out of my bubble I was in for over a year, isolating myself with work and canceling on every single gathering I was invited to. Solely focusing on my own personal financial goals surely is something I wanted, but I never realized how much it actually cost me until this very moment. I never went out once in over a year. I didn’t do anything except work on my projects. I only saw other people when we had lectures or in our shared flat which stopped as well in spring 2018 as everyone was back at home writing their thesis. It was a very, very strange feeling and I didn’t like that at all. So I did what every rational thinking person does when being faced with the harsh reality: I got back into my car, drove back home, stepped into my bubble and was working on some articles again within minutes of getting out of my car, not even taking the time to tell my parents I’ve successfully graduated.
From bad to worse
Now here I am. Graduated and basically free. The stress levels fell quite a bit, as a lot of permanent background noise finally vanished. Simultaneously, a subtle tone of loneliness settled in. I phoned some classmates the next days and remember that I was mentioning that “I have to come to a solution where I will go to because working from home all day is certainly not going to work”. I was seeing old friends from my hometown again and started a gym routine again, but those 2h a day I’m out don’t make up for being somewhere the whole day you really don’t want to be. I always worked with a clear goal in mind during uni: Being financially and geographically independent and move far away as soon as possible. Things were looking great for the past year, but not any longer. The financial aspect didn’t look like what I wanted it to look like before taking that step. Perfectly knowing that I failed my goal of the past 1.5 years my rational brain decided to go into protection mode and I continued to put my head down and work.
Soon enough I was trying to get my main Amazon product back on track which worked out ok. I didn’t even remotely make a noteworthy amount as I didn’t re-order in time nor did I put in enough effort to increase the sales numbers. I neglected it so badly that I barely checked it once a day. At the end of the year, the revenue was around 25.000€. Everyone who sells physical products knows that this means nothing, as a good margin lays around a mere 25% without taking operational costs into account.
I focussed on crypto the majority of time again from July onwards. The markets were bloody and soon enough BTC was crumbling around $6k while all the altcoins continued to bleed out over time. I still pumped out articles over articles, partly through my writer partly through myself.
My portfolio value has now decreased to $60,000. I received several payments only to see them drop in value by 70% within a day. $3000 payouts were now worth $900 and less. People were desperate. They dumped any coin they left, and without any buyers in the market, the values just dropped through the floor.
Things started to get really bad from September onwards. After 1.5 years of total isolation, I can sense that I’ll be back to zero soon. This, what I wanted to avoid so badly, was happening right now. Living back at home, a place where nothing grows. I distracted myself further with work and useless tasks, but deep down I knew things were bad.
I continued this path for several months until I posted my last article at the end of October 2018. The payouts stopped or ICOs would postpone their sale. Until this day, I am owed over $60,000. I don’t expect them to pay up, and if they do, the tokens won’t be worth anything.
My portfolio value sunk further to around $40,000 as I held a vast majority of it in altcoins that took an even worse beating than bitcoin, which was still holding its temporary bottom of $6k.
One month later it happened - the final nail in the coffin: BTC broke through and went down to $3k. My portfolio took another hit and was now worth around $20-25,000, exactly the amount I’ve put in more than a year ago, going back to $0 and even less, if one excludes the earnings from the articles and the writing costs.
Around that time tax season was due for my first two official years in business. I went through a lot of hoops to get everything done and paid around 1k€ to get the taxes done for 17 & 18 for Amazon alone. The earnings were laughable and even my CPA had a subtle tone of “Are you really sure you want to continue to do this?” in his voice when I picked up my balance sheets.
December and Christmas came around and as usual, it’s the worst time of the year. 2018 was done and I was left with nothing. Life, being dark as usual, became even darker by the day. For a very long time I’ve had this one phrase in mind: “aut caesar aut nihil” - “Either Caesar or nothing”. I’m pretty sure it will play out like this. There’s nothing in between.
____
I’ll cut it here as I’ve already written a novel at this point. I might share what’s going on right now or since the beginning of 2019 in my Amazon thread, as I think it’s important to keep it transparent and let people know how things can play out when you get side-tracked. I just wanted to share this story as I think it contains a few learnings one might use for himself in similar ventures or situations. I’ve spent probably 10 hours writing this (I told you I wasn’t a writer) in one go, so it’s time for me to wrap this up for now.
It was quite a venture for myself to re-think the past 2 years of my life and be putting it into words. From the highest highs to the lowest lows. From a 22 y/o full-time student with an automated monthly income of >$20,000 through blogging, $300,000 in cryptocurrencies and another automated $1.5k monthly income including Amazon FBA, to a 23 y/o dude living back at home left with nothing.
If someone actually reads through this, I fully expect comments like “Why didn’t you sell?!” “Why didn’t you take profits?!” and I can only imagine how hard some of the more experienced folks in here cringed at some trading/investment points I’ve brought up. It’s alright, it’s a fair and smart question. Looking back, obviously, I should have sold but hindsight is 20/20 etc.
I’m well aware that TFF favors winning stories and isn’t a place to complain, but I thought sharing the good with the bad gives one a more transparent picture of how things can go. Even though I added some very personal aspects as well, I’m sure it’s necessary to paint a clearer picture of what’s goes through once mind during the process.
It’s hard to see the upside of all of this right now, so I can’t really say I learned this and that, but I do know that I’ve learned a lot during that time period and reached new peak performance during the summer and early fall of 2017 in terms of discipline, mental clarity and work ethic which I strive to get back to everyday. I’m certainly not in the best mental spot since the summer of 2018 and I’m aware that it’s not only the loss of money that’s responsible for this. It’s more the fact that I sacrificed everything and got nothing in return, leaving me not only financial empty handed but also deprived of experiences and social relationships. There were a lot of very dark weeks and even months but those are consequences you have to endure when things don’t go as planned and if you can’t keep your mindset up.
However, I have not given up on my fastlane dreams yet. Even though I was probably as close as I ever were in my life. Once a 9-5 starts to look like an attractive alternative opposed to the life you’re living right now you know things are going badly.
I was always convinced that only one person has to believe in your vision and your success:
You.
As long as you believe in yourself (as cliche as it sounds) there’s nothing that can stop you from achieving your goals. It might take longer or it might be harder than initially thought, but in the end you will get there. I never say it out loud or even think about it like I just put it into words, but somewhere in the back of my mind I always had the assurance that I will make it. No matter the circumstances - I can achieve my goals as long as I work towards them.
A while ago this belief started to crumble and self-doubt set in. I tried my best to get my mind back to where it was and it’s still a daily struggle to keep the negative thoughts at bay. Even though I have the feeling that I’m only one more little hill away from reaching the promised lands, I know that I still have a long road ahead of me. A road through rocky, undulating dryland with only a few drops of water left in my bottle. Knowing I can’t wander around much longer, I’ve decided to invest every last € I had in my savings account into new products for my Amazon business, giving myself a final ultimatum to either sink or swim - or in my metaphor - reach the promised lands in time or run out of water.
And to be completely honest here, I’m not planning on dying of thirst.
I’ll make it work, no matter what.
Time goes on and the past can’t be changed. There’s no reason to mourn of what I could have done differently or what could have been. There’s only one way and that’s going forward. I won’t accept a lousy compromise of a mediocre life because I got punched in the mouth a little harder than usual. I’ve made it work before and I will make it work again.
I have dusted myself off and I’m on my way back to the field with my hands tightened on my dream-life bat preparing to swing once again to hit that long-yearned-for home run.
By now it was mid-March 2018 and it finally became too much to handle. The final semester of University was knocking on the door. Another thesis, company-projects, group works, final oral examination to finish the degree. My main “business”, which I didn’t push to grow further, was due to re-launch the first product on Amazon. With my second product being a failure, tasks for the first product to make up for it were due as well as general tasks that come with it: PPC campaigns, coupon codes, data analysis,re-ordering on time, market analysis, product sourcing, final preparation of products before sending them out. The question of where to live after University, where do I go, what do I do, can I sustain myself with what I do now? It all was staring at my face while I hammered away on my keyboard to push out articles about cryptocurrencies while still actively investing in ICOs myself. The stress levels were off the charts and now the last bit of sleep was gone. I would sleep for 2-3 hours a night usually would wake up to calls from DHL, customs or Amazon to fix some issues that were going on. Throwing in 2h worth of naps throughout the day to get at least 4-5 hours a day in was the norm for many months to come. On top of all of that, I saw LOADS of paper money disappear overnight as we’ve begun the free fall which would later be known as the beginning of the end. Way too many things were going on at once and I could barely sleep anymore. I’m pretty sure is the wrong word for what I felt during the time, it was more like a constant feeling of panic. Like your fight-or-flight response button being pressed over and over again. The stress level climbed to 99%.
It was disgusting.
April came around and I finally decided that I can’t continue like this. I couldn’t spend days researching and going through ICOs anymore. I couldn’t find the time any longer. So I started to automate it. This was a great solution and it put a real entrepreneurial flair to it as I would be able to take me out of the operative processes for 99% of the time. I went through 6 writers until I’ve found someone that did his research cleanly and understood the topics. I paid him $100 per article and the results were great. He lacked the technical understanding a little bit, but overall the quality was phenomenal. $2000 in token for $100 in fiat. Good deal. I designed a clear structure for every article so he wouldn’t miss anything. Once done, all I had to do was to format the articles and post them on my blog/twitter. It was a great system which only required 0.5-1h work a day tops, down from at least 5-6 hours depending on the volume I put out. It took some weight off my shoulders but I still felt something was off.
April passed and May came along. The automation worked nicely and I took up projects, forwarded them to my writer, received them a few days later, formatted and posted them on my blog. I had set up a money printing machine with minimal work, it felt great. Now, as the year went on, the overall crypto market continued to take a beating.
Bitcoin just bounced back up to $9000, but still, the paper losses were real and at this point I was surely down $100,000-$150,000 already. It sucked but I wasn’t too worried, I knew that the insane hype around Dec/Jan was not here to stay. I still believed in the long term vision and was confident in most of my investments. Additionally, the blog was generating a nice amount of (paper) money and I was on my best way to make $100,000 this year solely through writing.
Now, I haven’t mentioned it yet but I injured my shoulder at the end of September 2018. I wasn’t able to go to the gym at all and it’s the one and the only thing I REALLY need. As I kid it was football, as I got older it was the gym. I just need a physical counterpart to all the mental gymnastics during the day. At first, I thought it was my physical appearance that will suffer under the injury, but the mental aspects were WAY worse. Things were slowly but surely getting out of hand. The constant hyper stress paired with the lack of sleep and physical activity was killing me. Even after cutting back on the articles, stress levels didn't go down and soon enough peaked at 100%. I couldn’t handle it any longer, I have to pull the brake.
After laying off the researching and writing, I started to distance myself from the whole crypto space more and more. I just couldn’t do it anymore. It was eating up so much time and now University was in it’s finishing stages. The thesis was due at the end of May and I hadn’t even started 4 weeks before that. Additionally, the previously mentioned problems with Amazon kept getting worse and worse. The product was doing ok’ish, doing $4500 a month in revenue after I re-launched it in March. My main sales went through Amazon PPC as I directly marketed it as a premium product (and it actually is, quality wise). A competitor, however, decided that it’s ok to send some company-owned product test group participants my way to take out out every single PPC campaign of mine within minutes after I activated them. Not only burning through my PPC budget without mercy, but also wiping out 80% of sales within a month, now barely reaching $1000 in revenue. It went so far, that I got a badge of “Amazon Bestseller” with their company name + product title in it, probably because that’s the phrase their muppets had to look for before annihilating my PPC ads.
Now that the second thesis was due, I couldn’t do anything else. I shut everything off for 3 weeks and did nothing but researching and writing my damn thesis. It was an immense a waste of time but I just kept going, knowing it’s going to be the last useless thing I’ll have to do. I submitted it 10 minutes before midnight on the very last day. The final thesis was done, the last thing to do was to pass the oral exam in front of a committee at the end of June, 4 weeks from now. Subject matters: Everything we’ve learned in our 3 main subjects. I planned in 2 weeks to study, as I told myself if I don’t know the majority of the subjects by now I have wasted my time anyway.
I used the 2 open weeks of June till mid-June to keep up some crypto news again. I came back to another -50% of the majority of my holdings.
BTC was down to $7600 by then and I watched it crumble down another 20% to $6600 over the next two weeks. BTC is usually a good indicator of how the rest of the market performs. If BTC is down, everything else will be down as well. So this chart could easily represent my overall holdings, as I was probably down to $100,000 or even less since ATH.
I wasn’t it taking so lightly anymore. This was a lot of money, even though it was only on paper. I do however see it differently. It doesn’t matter if it’s on paper or not, having 100k on paper is as real as having 100k liquid, as long as you can actually liquidate the paper money anytime, i.e. not sitting in an illiquid asset. At any point, I could have pulled the trigger, liquidate my altcoins to ETH/BTC, transfer those to Coinbase and just sell it for fiat currency.
But I didn’t. Not at 300k, not at 200k and not at 100k.
What the hell am I doing?
I stopped everything once again mid-June and focused on my studies. As expected, I still recalled the vast majority of the subjects but I surely won’t risk slipping up. So I put my head down and studied for two weeks before I suit up and walked into the committee room to face the absolute final exam of my education on a sunny Friday afternoon at the end of June. The oral exam was smooth and I graduated one hour after I entered the conference room.
After being receiving congratulations of the committee I walked out into a sunny Friday afternoon. Nearly 3 years have passed since I first stepped into this very building. I stood outside and there it was:
Nothing.
Nothing and nobody.
All of my classmates had their exam the days before and nobody I knew was anywhere near. Everybody was back home and had already celebrated. By no means did I need to celebrate the graduation, as it has mainly become a side-occupation over the past 1.5 years, but I still very clearly remember the exact feeling of loneliness I felt on this very moment. I had a great relationship with a lot of my classmates and it being over just like that was a very weird feeling that I haven’t felt in years. I felt like someone pulled me out of my bubble I was in for over a year, isolating myself with work and canceling on every single gathering I was invited to. Solely focusing on my own personal financial goals surely is something I wanted, but I never realized how much it actually cost me until this very moment. I never went out once in over a year. I didn’t do anything except work on my projects. I only saw other people when we had lectures or in our shared flat which stopped as well in spring 2018 as everyone was back at home writing their thesis. It was a very, very strange feeling and I didn’t like that at all. So I did what every rational thinking person does when being faced with the harsh reality: I got back into my car, drove back home, stepped into my bubble and was working on some articles again within minutes of getting out of my car, not even taking the time to tell my parents I’ve successfully graduated.
From bad to worse
Now here I am. Graduated and basically free. The stress levels fell quite a bit, as a lot of permanent background noise finally vanished. Simultaneously, a subtle tone of loneliness settled in. I phoned some classmates the next days and remember that I was mentioning that “I have to come to a solution where I will go to because working from home all day is certainly not going to work”. I was seeing old friends from my hometown again and started a gym routine again, but those 2h a day I’m out don’t make up for being somewhere the whole day you really don’t want to be. I always worked with a clear goal in mind during uni: Being financially and geographically independent and move far away as soon as possible. Things were looking great for the past year, but not any longer. The financial aspect didn’t look like what I wanted it to look like before taking that step. Perfectly knowing that I failed my goal of the past 1.5 years my rational brain decided to go into protection mode and I continued to put my head down and work.
Soon enough I was trying to get my main Amazon product back on track which worked out ok. I didn’t even remotely make a noteworthy amount as I didn’t re-order in time nor did I put in enough effort to increase the sales numbers. I neglected it so badly that I barely checked it once a day. At the end of the year, the revenue was around 25.000€. Everyone who sells physical products knows that this means nothing, as a good margin lays around a mere 25% without taking operational costs into account.
I focussed on crypto the majority of time again from July onwards. The markets were bloody and soon enough BTC was crumbling around $6k while all the altcoins continued to bleed out over time. I still pumped out articles over articles, partly through my writer partly through myself.
My portfolio value has now decreased to $60,000. I received several payments only to see them drop in value by 70% within a day. $3000 payouts were now worth $900 and less. People were desperate. They dumped any coin they left, and without any buyers in the market, the values just dropped through the floor.
Things started to get really bad from September onwards. After 1.5 years of total isolation, I can sense that I’ll be back to zero soon. This, what I wanted to avoid so badly, was happening right now. Living back at home, a place where nothing grows. I distracted myself further with work and useless tasks, but deep down I knew things were bad.
I continued this path for several months until I posted my last article at the end of October 2018. The payouts stopped or ICOs would postpone their sale. Until this day, I am owed over $60,000. I don’t expect them to pay up, and if they do, the tokens won’t be worth anything.
My portfolio value sunk further to around $40,000 as I held a vast majority of it in altcoins that took an even worse beating than bitcoin, which was still holding its temporary bottom of $6k.
One month later it happened - the final nail in the coffin: BTC broke through and went down to $3k. My portfolio took another hit and was now worth around $20-25,000, exactly the amount I’ve put in more than a year ago, going back to $0 and even less, if one excludes the earnings from the articles and the writing costs.
Around that time tax season was due for my first two official years in business. I went through a lot of hoops to get everything done and paid around 1k€ to get the taxes done for 17 & 18 for Amazon alone. The earnings were laughable and even my CPA had a subtle tone of “Are you really sure you want to continue to do this?” in his voice when I picked up my balance sheets.
December and Christmas came around and as usual, it’s the worst time of the year. 2018 was done and I was left with nothing. Life, being dark as usual, became even darker by the day. For a very long time I’ve had this one phrase in mind: “aut caesar aut nihil” - “Either Caesar or nothing”. I’m pretty sure it will play out like this. There’s nothing in between.
____
I’ll cut it here as I’ve already written a novel at this point. I might share what’s going on right now or since the beginning of 2019 in my Amazon thread, as I think it’s important to keep it transparent and let people know how things can play out when you get side-tracked. I just wanted to share this story as I think it contains a few learnings one might use for himself in similar ventures or situations. I’ve spent probably 10 hours writing this (I told you I wasn’t a writer) in one go, so it’s time for me to wrap this up for now.
It was quite a venture for myself to re-think the past 2 years of my life and be putting it into words. From the highest highs to the lowest lows. From a 22 y/o full-time student with an automated monthly income of >$20,000 through blogging, $300,000 in cryptocurrencies and another automated $1.5k monthly income including Amazon FBA, to a 23 y/o dude living back at home left with nothing.
If someone actually reads through this, I fully expect comments like “Why didn’t you sell?!” “Why didn’t you take profits?!” and I can only imagine how hard some of the more experienced folks in here cringed at some trading/investment points I’ve brought up. It’s alright, it’s a fair and smart question. Looking back, obviously, I should have sold but hindsight is 20/20 etc.
I’m well aware that TFF favors winning stories and isn’t a place to complain, but I thought sharing the good with the bad gives one a more transparent picture of how things can go. Even though I added some very personal aspects as well, I’m sure it’s necessary to paint a clearer picture of what’s goes through once mind during the process.
It’s hard to see the upside of all of this right now, so I can’t really say I learned this and that, but I do know that I’ve learned a lot during that time period and reached new peak performance during the summer and early fall of 2017 in terms of discipline, mental clarity and work ethic which I strive to get back to everyday. I’m certainly not in the best mental spot since the summer of 2018 and I’m aware that it’s not only the loss of money that’s responsible for this. It’s more the fact that I sacrificed everything and got nothing in return, leaving me not only financial empty handed but also deprived of experiences and social relationships. There were a lot of very dark weeks and even months but those are consequences you have to endure when things don’t go as planned and if you can’t keep your mindset up.
However, I have not given up on my fastlane dreams yet. Even though I was probably as close as I ever were in my life. Once a 9-5 starts to look like an attractive alternative opposed to the life you’re living right now you know things are going badly.
I was always convinced that only one person has to believe in your vision and your success:
You.
As long as you believe in yourself (as cliche as it sounds) there’s nothing that can stop you from achieving your goals. It might take longer or it might be harder than initially thought, but in the end you will get there. I never say it out loud or even think about it like I just put it into words, but somewhere in the back of my mind I always had the assurance that I will make it. No matter the circumstances - I can achieve my goals as long as I work towards them.
A while ago this belief started to crumble and self-doubt set in. I tried my best to get my mind back to where it was and it’s still a daily struggle to keep the negative thoughts at bay. Even though I have the feeling that I’m only one more little hill away from reaching the promised lands, I know that I still have a long road ahead of me. A road through rocky, undulating dryland with only a few drops of water left in my bottle. Knowing I can’t wander around much longer, I’ve decided to invest every last € I had in my savings account into new products for my Amazon business, giving myself a final ultimatum to either sink or swim - or in my metaphor - reach the promised lands in time or run out of water.
And to be completely honest here, I’m not planning on dying of thirst.
I’ll make it work, no matter what.
Time goes on and the past can’t be changed. There’s no reason to mourn of what I could have done differently or what could have been. There’s only one way and that’s going forward. I won’t accept a lousy compromise of a mediocre life because I got punched in the mouth a little harder than usual. I’ve made it work before and I will make it work again.
I have dusted myself off and I’m on my way back to the field with my hands tightened on my dream-life bat preparing to swing once again to hit that long-yearned-for home run.
Last edited: