Avoid the mistakes we made, focus on building wealth for the long term

I’m glad Robert and I learned this early enough.

Crypto social media is loud, confusing, and honestly kind of exhausting. One influencer is calling a new all time high, the next one is predicting a crash, and somewhere in the middle a whole lot of people are just trying to get rich quick without really understanding what they’re holding.

I’ve been there. My friend Robert and I started buying Bitcoin back in 2016, a few years out of high school. Our strategy was to buy low, sell high, repeat forever. Except it didn’t work like that. After a full cycle of chasing moves and second guessing entries, we sat down and did the math. We had actually lost money. All that screen time, all that stress, and a simple buy and hold would have actually put us in the green.

That was a humbling moment, but it turned out to be the most valuable lesson we ever got.

So we shifted our strategy completely. Instead of obsessing over price, we started asking why Bitcoin even mattered. Why was it worth it holding it long term? We dug into the fundamentals, the fixed supply, the global adoption curve, what it actually means to have a scarce asset in a world where money gets printed way too much. The more we understood it, the more convicted we became. And we made a simple decision. Dollar cost average in consistently, and let time do the work.

Sounds easy, but the truth is it wasn’t.

Watching Bitcoin run up over 1,000% and then drop 60 to 80% from all time highs will mess with your head in ways you don’t expect. There were moments where Robert and I would look at each other and think, should we have just sold when times were really good? Any reasonable person asks that question. The emotions are real and they hit hard. But we’d made a decision early on. Keep holding, or don’t hold anything at all. We kept each other grounded and stuck to the original strategy. To be completely honest it really helped having him there as support. I don’t know if I could do it on my own with so many contradicting thoughts running through my mind.

But what do you know, a few cycles later and we’re still holding, still in the green, and honestly those big drawdowns barely phase us anymore. Not because they got smaller, but because our understanding of what we own got a whole lot bigger. Conviction is a form of protection like no other.

If you’re just starting out and feeling the anxiety of all this, you’re not alone and you’re not doing it wrong. The journey just takes time to make sense.

Pick an amount you can buy consistently without stressing your budget. Set it on a recurring schedule. Then invest your energy into actually learning what Bitcoin is and why it exists. I promise you won’t regret it.

Thank you for reading, and stay tuned for more!

Where are you in your journey? I’d love to hear it in the comments!