Why subscribe?

So my newsletter can be jammed in amongst the other 300 substacks you have subscribed to at some random email address!

The purpose of this sub is to help myself and the readers gradually understand and improve the functioning of our brain. If you have a better outlook on life, everyone around you is positively affected.

While the brain is the main focus, there has to be another topic to apply our learnings of the brain to. The topic will be DeFi, also known as Decentralized Finance. This is the edge of the world stuff, very complicated and risky, but so interesting and mentally complex!

Despite the complexities, my aim - like so many others - is to write like I’m talking to a 5th grader. If I can’t explain to her, I can’t don’t understand it. And I don’t understand 99% of life! So here’s hoping :)

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Ok, so the italicized sections above were Substack’s writing. Despite all the bullshit about rushing and “go now!” and “work harder!” The reality is you don’t need to stay up-to-date. Nothing about my substack has ANY urgency.

In fact, nothing I will say is going to be new, and that’s intentional. Anything new needs a lot of time to be proven true!

My hope is you read this whenever you have a few minutes. Maybe it takes, maybe it doesn’t. That’s how it goes.

Join the crew - DeFi and All

As cliche and shamwowy as it sounds, if I could have a satoshi of humanity improve mentally as a community here, that’d be so freaking cool and rewarding. Small steps of progress. That’s it.

I am going to focus on providing my message through the lens of DeFi (decentralized finance). Why DeFI? Finance and entrepreneurship have been my passions since I was a kid. I have been investing for over two decades now, since I was 15, putting my hard earned cash into my dad’s investment account, making terrible decisions and investments with my money. It’s been like that for 20+ years now with improvements along the way.

My investment path has progressed as follows:

  • Stock investing (started in ‘00)

  • Stock investing + Bitcoin + Ethereum (‘20)

  • Stock investing + Bitcoin + Ethereum + NFTs (‘21)

  • Stock investing + Bitcoin + Ethereum + NFTs + DeFi (‘22)

So I am a total newbie in DeFi and have so much to learn. DeFi is a very muddy world, covered in rug pulls, scams, and promoters and bullshit, but I also view it as one of the greatest - if not the greatest - investment opportunities of my lifetime, similar to how I viewed BTC when it was finally clear (to me at least) in 2020 that there was no way this was failing.

To acknowledge your mental frailties, biases, irrationalities, and stereotypes takes a lot of introspection and digging into your soul. Most people are not built to question themselves this way, but I think everyone is able to manipulate our brains - just like it manipulates us - and improve your mental outlook and the way your brain functions.

The A-HA! moment for me with all of this was when I finally realized how wrong and inaccurate and irrational so many of my decisions were. I finally said, “I have to change my brain somehow. Why would I ever want my brain to automatically give me the wrong answer over and over again?”

Seems crazy that we allow this, doesn’t it?

Over the past three years, I have traversed many ups and downs. Some of these downs for me, particularly one medical problem, could have crushed my soul, or worse, I could have died.

I changed my pessimistic outlook I had for all of my life, turning my path towards another unknown road, but one illuminated, and I started walking.

My mental adjustments have changed my life. Together, as a team or community or whatever, we constantly search to improve. That’s it.

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Everything starts with our brain. Improving our understanding and functioning of the brain can consequentially improve our life. So let's do it.

People

Work: DriveWealth Live: Bay Area CA