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The real DD on SLV, the worlds biggest short squeeze is possible and we can make history
Update 2/4 - someone went ahead and spelled out the mechanics of the squeeze quite well and I would like to give their post attention https://www.reddit.com/wallstreetbets/comments/lc8vgo/slv_is_not_going_to_get_squeezedslv_is_the_trojan/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf Update 2/2 - I am able to comment again. I messaged several mods on Reddit and the mod account on Twitter. None of them responded but it appears I am able to comment again so I assume one of them lifted my ban Update 2/1 - I have been banned from posting on WSB. I guess they aren’t yet deleting my post here given the media attention. If this was a rogue mod I’d appreciate being restored the ability to post on WSB. I’m open to talking to any mods Update 1/31 - there have been tons of 'what to buy' questions so I added a clarity post, hope it helps. It's also getting downvoted to hell because its not about GME so that's discouraging. The speed at which the downvotes flew in makes me think someone made bots to crush new posts related to SLV (or maybe anything not GME). It makes no sense for this post to have 93% upvotes and my new one to have 28%. I have not sold my GME to buy SLV. I had a small pre-existing position in leaps I bought months ago. Created an official Twitter handle not sure if I’ll use it, but didn’t want anyone to impersonate me on there Here is the longer DD for the short squeeze case for SLV, a follow-up from my shorter post a few hours ago. Note that I talk in first person as this is something I’m going to do. Everyone is free to do as they individually please and copy my trade if they’d like to. I think it’s absurd that forces at be think this forum is manipulating by posting publicly but that’s where we are at right now. First things first, I'm not doing this until the GME rise is done. I am long GME but am going long SLV immediately after. Update 1/29: due to the manipulation and collusion of citadel, hedge funds, and brokers to change the rules and rig the game in their favor. Who likely knew ahead of time and bought puts right before and calls at the bottom, GME is too important to abandon still. SLV is still my next play but GME needs to go to $1000 and these people need to go to jail. If you just want to know what to buy skip to the end I present 2 investment DDs in this post, the short squeeze and the fundamentals. If you want to see what to buy The short squeeze: Buy SLV shares and SLV call options to force physical delivery of silver to the SLV vaults. Also buy physical silver bullion. The best possible thing would be to take physical delivery in the futures market if you have access to do so. The silver futures market has oscillated between having roughly 100-1 and 500-1 ratio of paper traded silver to physical silver, but lets call it 250-1 for now. This means that for every 250 ounces in open interest in the futures market, only 1 actually gets delivered. Most traders would rather settle with cash rather than take delivery of thousands of ounces of silver and have to figure out to store and transport it in the future. The people naked shorting silver via the futures markets are a couple of large banks and making them pay dearly for their over leveraged naked shorts would be incredible. It's not Melvin capital on the other side of this trade, its JP Morgan. Time to get some payback for the bailouts and manipulation they've done for decades (look up silver manipulation fines that JPM has paid over the years). The way the squeeze could occur is by forcing a much higher percentage of the futures contracts to actually deliver physical silver. There is very little silver in the COMEX vaults or available to actually be use to deliver, and if they have to start buying en masse on the open market they will drive the price massively higher. There is no way to magically create more physical silver in the world that is ready to be delivered. With a stock you can eventually just issue more shares if the price rises too much, but this simply isn't the case here. The futures market is kind of the wild west of the financial world. Real commodities are being traded, and if you are short, you literally have to deliver thousands of ounces of silver per contract if the holder on the other side demands it. If you remember oil going negative back in May, that was possible because futures are allowed to trade to their true value. They aren't halted and that's what will make this so fun when the true squeeze happens. Edit for more detail: let’s say there’s one futures seller who gets unlucky and gets the buyer who actually wants to take delivery. He doesn’t have the silver and realizes it’s all of a sudden damn difficult to find some physical silver. He throws up his hands and just goes long a matching number of futures contracts and will demand actual delivery on those. Problem solved because he has now matched the demanding buyer with a new seller. The issue is that the new seller has the same issue and does the exact same thing. This is how the cascade effect of a meltup occurs. All the naked shorts trying to offload their position to someone who actually has some silver. My goal is to ensure that I have the silver and won’t sell to them until silver is at a far higher price due to the desperation. The silver market is much larger than GME in terms of notional value, but there is very little physical silver actually readily available (think about the difference between total shares and the shares in the active float for a stock), and the paper silver trading hands in the futures market is hundreds of times larger than what is available. Thus when they are forced to actually deliver physical silver it will create a massive short squeeze where an absurd amount of silver will be sought after (to fulfill their contractually obligated delivery) with very little available to actually buy. They are naked shorting silver and will have to cover all at once and the float as a percentage of the total silver stock globally is truly miniscule. The fundamentals: The current gold to silver ratio is 73-1. Meaning the price of gold per ounce is 73 times the price of silver. Naturally occurring silver is only 18.75 times as common as gold, so this ratio of 73-1 is quite high. Until the early 20th century, silver prices were pegged at a 15-1 ratio to gold in the US because this ratio was relatively known even then. In terms of current production, the ratio is even lower at 8-1. Meaning the world is only producing 8 ounces of silver for each newly produced ounce of gold. Global industry has been able to get away with producing so little new silver for so long because governments have dumped silver on the market for 80 years, but now their silver vaults are empty. At the end of WW2 government vaults globally contained 10 billion ounces of silver, but as we moved to fiat currency and away from precious metal backed currencies, the amount held by governments has decreased to only 0.24 billion ounces as they dumped their supply into the market. But this dumping is done now as their remaining supply is basically nil. This 0.24 billion ounces represents only 8% of the total supply of only 3 billion ounces stored as investment globally. This means that 92% of that gold is held privately by institutions and by millions of boomer gold and silver bugs who have been sitting on meager gains for decades. These boomers aren't going to sell no matter what because they see their silver cache as part of their doomsday prepper supplies. It's locked away in bunkers they built 500 miles from their house. Also, with silver at $23 an ounce currently, this means all of the worlds investment grade silver only has a total market cap of $70 billion. For comparison the investment grade gold in the world is worth roughly $6 trillion. This is because most of the silver produced each year actually gets used, as I have mentioned. $70 billion sounds like a lot, but we don’t have to buy all that much for the price to go up a lot. **If the squeeze happens, it would be like 40 years worth of their gains in 4 months ** The reason that only 8 ounces of silver are produced for every 1 ounce of gold in today's world is because there aren't really any good naturally occurring silver deposits left in the world. Silver is more common than gold in the earth's crust, but it is spread very thin. Thus nearly every ounce of silver produces is actually a byproduct of mining for other metals such as gold or copper. This means that even as the silver price skyrockets, it wont be easy to increase the supply of silver being produced. Even if new mines were to be constructed, it could take years to come online. Finally, most of this newly created silver supply each year is used for productive purposes rather than kept for investment. It is used in electronics, solar panels, and jewelry for the most part. This demand wont go away if the silver price rises, so the short sellers will be trying to get their hands on a very small slice of newly minted silver. The solar market is also growing quickly and political pressure to increase solar and electric vehicles could provide more industrial demand. The other part of the story is the faster moving piece and that is the inflation and currency debasement fear portion. The government and the fed are printing money like crazy debasing the value of the dollar, so investors look for real assets like precious metals to hide out in, driving demand for silver. The $1.9 trillion stimulus passing in a month or two could be a good catalyst. All this money combined with the reopening of the economy could cause some solid inflation to occur, and once inflation starts it often feeds on itself. What to buy: Edit 2/24: I now advocate buying PSLV for shares, physical metal if the premiums come back down, and if you want options then SLV is still ok for that. I will be putting 50% directly into SLV shares, and 50% into the $35 strike SLV calls expiring 4/16. This way the SLV purchase creates a groundswell into silver immediately that then rockets through a gamma squeeze as SLV approaches $35. Price target of $75 for SLV by end of April if the short squeeze happens. Edit: for the part of your purchases going into shares, some people recommend PSLV because they think SLV might start lying about having the silver in their vault. Or that the custodian will be double counting, ie claiming that the same silver belongs to multiple people (banking on the fact that people wont all try to get their silver at once). So if you buy SLV shares and calls, that's great. But I think it could be prudent for us to buy options in SLV (no options on PSLV) and shares in PSLV. It all depends on how paranoid you want to be. There is a lot of paranoia in the precious metals world. Alternate options: - buying physical silver; this also works but you pay a premium to buy and sell so its less efficient and you take fewer silver ounces off of the market because of the premium you pay - going long futures for February or March; if you are a rich bastard and can actually take physical delivery of 1000s of ounces of silver by all means do so. But if you simply settle for cash you are actually part of the problem. We need actual physical delivery, which is what SLV demands and is why SLV is the way to go unless you are going to take delivery - miners; I don’t recommend buying miners as part of this trade. Miners will absolutely go up if SLV goes up, but buying them doesn't create the squeeze in the actual silver market. Furthermore, most silver miners only derive 30-50% of their revenue from silver anyways, so eventually SLV will outperform them as it gets high enough (and each marginal SLV dollar only increases miner profits by a smaller and smaller percentage) Details on SLV physical settlement: When SLV issues shares, the custodian is forced to true up their vaults with the proportional amount of silver daily. From the SLV prospectus: "An investment in Shares is: Backed by silver held by the Custodian on behalf of the Trust. The Shares are backed by the assets of the Trust. The Trustee’s arrangements with the Custodian contemplate that at the end of each business day there can be in the Trust account maintained by the Custodian no more than 1,100 ounces of silver in an unallocated form. The bulk of the Trust’s silver holdings is represented by physical silver, identified on the Custodian’s or, if applicable, sub-custodian's, books in allocated and unallocated accounts on behalf of the Trust and is held by the Custodian in London, New York and other locations that may be authorized in the future." Join me brothers. Lets take silver to the moon and take on the biggest and baddest manipulators in the world. Please post rocket emojis in the comments as desired. Disclaimer: do your own research, make your own decisions, everything here is a guess and hypothetical and nothing is guaranteed, not a financial advisor, I have ADHD and maybe other things too. Bear case: silver does tend to sell off if the broader market plunges so it’s not immune to broad market sell off. It’s also the most manipulated market in the world so we are facing some tough competition on the short side
Feb 4, mid-market: Thank you everyone for your support. I really don't know what to say. The company keeps getting pounded because GME is having a sell-off, which doesn't make any sense. But that's the market for you. It doesn't always make sense. I still believe 2021 will be a big year for Nokia, although it doesn't look like there is any way we'll manage the crazy play anymore. Still, it was nice to see something that was impossible become possible, even if it was for only a few days. And remember, we can still do it any day. All it takes is for us to work together. If you want. Make up your own mind. I'm still holding. NOK will recover from this. Fair value is at least 4.81, and way more when 5G really gets going. So if you can, I would buy some more now. You'll thank me later for the tip. It may not be the most exciting play, but it is what investing is all about. Slow and steady growth that compounds to make a big change. One of these days I'll be able to post again, when the mods lift the restrictions on new posts and things get a little less crazy around here. When I post again about NOK, I'll post the link here too. Thanks everyone! Feb 4 premarket: Earnings out! They beat expectations a bit, their revenue was a little smaller than expected. Overall, good quarter, good year. Here it is: https://www.nokia.com/system/files/2021-02/nokia_results_2020_q4.pdf Feb 2, end of day: It's getting pretty crazy out there, but here's what you should know. The NOK chart is following the GME chart. It's got way more shares so the bumps and dips are more stable, but that's the main trend. What that means: GME has no underlying value at this level. It is a gamble on the short squeeze. It might pay off, or it might not. If people panic sell like yesterday, it won't. NOK is very different. It has underlying value. So if someone dumps it below its target price, the best thing to do is just to buy and wait for the value to go down. Thursday NOK reveals its earnings, and they are likely to be good based on what Ericsson revealed. Ericsson is one of its main competitors and a very similar company currently trading at twice the NOK price. Feb 1, end of day: Told you it was a value share! Still trading at target, still low risk. Either dumping has stopped, or normies are piling in because of the results. Either way good news, hope you made some money today!Vol today 190m, still way above average. Normal average 30m before we changed it lol. That means since Wednesday over 2bn shares have changed hands. Hope you got em! Ericsson (NOK competitor) results suggest NOK will report good numbers this week, NOK upped to BUY on market watch: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/nokia-upped-to-buy-after-ericsson-results-2021-02-01 Unless my math is retarded (which it is cos ahmsodumb), if everyone (7m) on this sub spends $3000 at current price ($4.55) we BUY THE FLOAT. The more they keep dumping, the more shares we get cheap. Think about it.EDIT: buying the ENTIRE float is NOT the point of this play. I know share price goes up when supply is restricted, just read the play. This is just an example of what happens when they dump a value share on millions of retail investors. BLACKROCK IS IN PEOPLE: https://fintel.io/so/us/nok/blackrock Robin hood increases NOK allowance to 2000 shares for next week (still any allowance is CRAZY because it's a VALUE SHARE THAT HASN'T BUBBLED) https://robinhood.com/us/en/support/articles/changes-due-to-recent-market-volatility/?fbclid=IwAR2SK9VQOI_eBgBF0SK4-R1eQjBkSAe3sd6KMwSBaCPmz38e5cc8siRdhEY You dump a VALUE STOCK on me and think I'm in danger? Added new summary (30 Jan), and Q&A. FIRST OFF: This post is not financial advice or anything except the rant of some idiot retard who is an idiot. I tell you straight up that there is a normal investment side to the NOK play (STILL MEANS RISK, which YOU will have to decide!) and that there is a CRAZY side that is PROBABLY IMPOSSIBLE. If you want to play the crazy play then you’re also a crazy retard idiot just like me. I don’t know shit, I just look at graphs and go WOW. Do your own due diligence, I am not a financial advisor. Don’t ask me if you should buy, I don’t know, can you afford to? Are you comfortable with the risks? I don’t know these things. You do. NOK PLAY: Here’s how it works. YOU DECIDE if you want to take part. 1.It’s not a short squeeze like GME. Get that out of your head. 2.It’s a value/momentum play. The value part is just normal granny&grampa investing. See a good company going cheap, buy and hold. Tell your mom, dad, granny and grampa, cousins, relatives, friends. 3.The momentum part is the crazy part, and if it works the share will SKYROCKET as long as YOU DON’T SELL. GME is the biggest short squeeze in history, the NOK play could be the biggest value buy in history.
The beauty of it is that it works because Wall St is dumping NOK irrationally. That’s why the price is going down (slowly). They think they’re attacking us and slowly winning, but they’re giving us a value share cheap = their money, our pockets. By the time they realize what we did, it will be too late.
Don’t panic, and keep buying the dumps (if you think the company has value), and if we hold the line you could see a miracle.
3310 HANDS Value Part (crazy part in Q&A): The company is healthy, has good financials, it’s a market leader in 5G (it’s main competitors are Huawei and Ericsson, they have about the same market share share of 5G) a lot of potential to be the company that builds 5G for a large part of the world. NOK is currently trading at a standard price for the value it holds. It is not a bubble. Here’s Nokia’s 5G contracts: https://www.nokia.com/networks/5g/5g-contracts/ Here’s Bloomberg shitting bricks that we’ve realized that Nokia is a value bet: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-28/gamestop-may-be-a-reddit-wallstreetbets-game-but-nokia-sure-isn-t Nokia also just unveiled new 1tb tech, the thing AFTER 5G. First on the world. They have it, they’re showing the world it works. Here is their press release from Wednesday: https://www.nasdaq.com/press-release/nokia-and-elisa-push-network-boundaries-with-worlds-first-1t-deployment-2021-01-27 They are so trusted that NASA got them to build a cell network on the MOON. Literally. If you’re NASA, would you hire your retard uncle Earl to build cell towers on the moon? No, you hire someone who CAN ACTUALLY DO IT. Imagine what it takes to build something really big and complicated on the moon? Now imagine who’s the likely guy who can do it. That’s right, NOKIA. Here they are, going to the moon: https://www.nokia.com/about-us/news/releases/2020/10/19/nokia-selected-by-nasa-to-build-first-ever-cellular-network-on-the-moon/ If the Huawei 5G war continues, who do you think US and Europe is going to back, especially since NOK already has the next tech, owns a bunch of patents, is from FINLAND that has never tried to take over the world and has a brand that EVERYONE who lived in 2000s remembers? Here’s a guy who’s been doing the numbers for a while now in case you want to see them: https://www.reddit.com/useJimming/comments/l7f6ua/part_iv_option_chain_analysis_on_nok_and_why_you/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf I don’t know him, I don’t know the numbers as well, but looks pretty good to me. Amazing due diligence. But what do I know, I’m an idiot. So is he. So are you. We’re all fucking retards, just ask Wall Street. I poked myself in the same eye twice yesterday. We’re “dumb money”. They have other names for us too. So, worst case, you just bought into a good company at a fair value. If the crazy play doesn’t work, you just hold on to them and let them become the world leader in 5G. Unlike GME (NOT SAYING SELL!), NOK will not fall 99%. Or if it does, I'M BUYING THAT SHIT because if a HEALTHY COMPANY FALLS 99% you make some CRAZY MONEY on that when it bounces back. Q&A Q: You retards were tricked by bots to buying NOK, there’s no short A: This just full on doesn’t get what the play is about. IT IS NOT A SHORT SQUEEZE. THIS IS NOT GME RINSE REPEAT. GME IS A DIFFERENT PLAY. NOK IS A VALUE PLAY. How many more ways can I say it? Not sure. How many more do I have to? Q: Stop taking attention away from GME you retards A: Nobody is saying sell your GME. Nobody is saying that. GME is too expensive for a lot of people, and GME is VERY RISKY and NOK has genuine value behind it. If the NOK play works, those people who couldn’t afford GME can still get on & get rich. If it doesn’t, they most likely still make money on a good company. Q: This play is impossible / crazy / it’ll never work / there are too many shares you retards A: This is ALMOST true. This play WAS impossible until 1/27/2021. That is why nobody has EVER tried anything like this. But it’s NOT impossible anymore. Look at this graph. Look at it. See that spike? What the fuck is that? I’ll tell you my fellow autistic space boot packin 3310 using NOKSTER. https://preview.redd.it/v473xl00ghe61.png?width=2182&format=png&auto=webp&s=bf5aac455156dbadb919b80afacb5232af0a05b5 That spike was them running out of shares for half an hour. Trade was stopped until they could find more, to avoid an artificial spike in the price. Proof? Look at the volumes. A small sale (red) causes a small dip. Two small buys cause a MASSIVE SPIKE. They ran out, and had to call their friends to liquidate more shares so the price wouldn’t skyrocket "artificially". But that’s IMPOSSIBLE for NOK. NOK has 5bn shares. Nokia should be much more stable because it has so many shares, having a crazy demand spike is crazy. I saw it, and fell off my chair and since I’m such a retard it took me an hour to get back up. So it was impossible, and that’s why Wall Street won’t see it coming. They think this is their attack and they’re about to break through our ranks, but they’re actually playing right into our hands. Wendnesday, we moved 1bn shares. Thursday, when nobody could buy, we still moved 500m. Yesterday, we still moved 360m. We’ve moved so much NOK in the past three days, the average volume of the share has MORE THAN DOUBLED in THREE DAYS. The play is not impossible anymore, but Wall St thinks it is, which is how we can use their own strength and mass against them. But the value buy still makes sense WHENEVER you see someone dump a valuable share. Someone sells you a 100$ bill for 90$? Buy it. They attack? We absorb. They dump, we buy, they run out of shares, we hold. They’re fucked, and they just handed us a bunch of value shares at an undervalue = they just gave us their money. They are just giving it to you. When they realize they can’t buy them back at a lower value, what do you think is going to happen? Q: We don’t do value plays, we do short squeezes you retards A: Go back to April. Look at u/DeepFuckingValue’s position. GME was a value play. It’s only in April that the Short Squeeze became possible. Look it up yourself. Will a short squeeze also happen with NOK? It’s unlikely. Hedge Fund Assholes have been increasing their shorts in NOK in the last few days, but they won’t go over 100% on 5bn shares because they're not as stupid as me. But it doesn’t have to happen. We just need to buy the dumps. If they short, great. More money for us as long as we don’t let them drive the price down with the dumps. Q: Why is NOK not rocketing? A: Because Wall Street is dumping, just like I said they would after the Wednesday spike. That’s the whole plan. They dump, we hold the line, buy the dumps and keep the price steady. The GME short squeeze guys waited for this for UP TO TWO YEARS. I saw it in April. I thought it was crazy. I didn’t jump in back then. If I did, I’d have about as much money as u/DeepFuckingValue. On a value share, you can afford to wait. GME was originally a value play. That’s what I should have realized in April. SO JUST WAIT AND HOLD (if you believe and idiot like me, which you shouldn't, no need to message me about it). It’s been two days since this play even became possible. Q: How do we know it’s working? A: Look at the volume of shares traded. Nokia has 5bn shares. In the last three days, nearly 2bn have been traded. The price is still up from last week. That’s how. This has already been a giant dumping campaign. How come the price hasn’t floored? What happens if we just buy it all up? What happens if they run out, and then their shorts blow, the price bumps up, CNBC tells the world we broke another short wall, everyone piles on, Wall Street realizes they just gave us their shares at an undervalue and try to buy back, we don’t sell, we have all the shares? The Wednesday spike is what happens, except this time there is no stopping it. If they stop trading again and try to dump some more, you just buy up the dump and keep the spike going. Spike stops being a spike and becomes a floor. Q: Where will this max out and when? A: What do you think I’m from the future? I just saw an impossible thing happen on Wednesday, and we need to make it happen again. Look at the graph. Look at it. Set your targets to $3310, that should do it. Q: When should I buy? What should I buy? Should I buy? A: Be your own person. Buy when you feel like it, if you feel like it. Q: Wall street bots are promoting NOK. A: I don’t give a shit. If they are, and we keep buying, they are promoting giving us money. Part 2: (29 Jan) First off, much as I appreciate the love, I can’t play your hand for you. You have to make your own decisions. Do I know where NOK is going to be tomorrow? Nope. Nobody does. All that I have for you is the news from Wednesday that this play is no longer totally impossible:
I think the assholes are going to try to dump you out of the market
It won’t work if we keep the demand up.
The way we keep demand up is we buy, and others will follow us because the company is good.
When they realize it won’t work, they’ll need to start buying back in.
Then it’ll be too late, cos they dumped their shares on US and we are RETARDS who HOLD. That means that when their shorts start to go bust, the price will jump up (a little bit, not like with GME at first – this is a different play based on the health of the company, not a straight up short squeeze. The short position on NOK is much smaller).
When the price jumps up, and the GME guys start cashing out, they need somewhere to put that cash. Some of them pay off student loans, or buy cars or whatever, but the smart ones will go NOK.
How you play it is up to you. I can’t tell you if you should buy, what minute to buy, what app to use and so on. All I can say is I buy the dumps. You need to decide for yourself if you want to do it. You can see the dumps on any app, or even yahoo finance. I buy NOK on NYSE, and I buy straight up shares (so they can’t lend out mine for shorts) but you’re free to do what you want. I’m a retard, you’re a retard, we’re all autistic fucks, we make up our own mind and stick with it. Secondly, what I said yesterday morning would happen, did happen. And it happened exactly like I said it would. So don’t get scared off, just buy the dumps. And they know that they’ll be fucked if we keep buying the dumps. That’s why they stopped us from buying NOK. NOK hasn’t bubbled, stopping us from buying NOK was because they know we’re on to them. They know the dumps won’t work if we JUST KEEP BUYING and HOLDING. The play works, they’re scared, we caught them with their pants down, they’re trying to get ahead of us. OK, so about what happened yesterday with RH and others. I’m so fucking angry about this. What RH and others did is completely insane. Their argument is “you guys are throwing your money away on a bubble, we’re just protecting you”. Bullshit. I won’t comment on GME, I’ll let u/DeepFuckingValue or one of those guys do that. I’ll just say, that short squeezes happen with hedge funds all the fucking time. Why is trading not stopped for them? They have people’s fucking pensions that they’re playing with. But for NOK, it’s TOTAL BULLSHIT. Here’s why:
NOK HAS NOT BUBBLED. Look at the graph. Look at it. It is still down from 2016. NOK is well within normal variation. Long term, you barely see the spike from a couple of days ago. There is nothing to “protect us” from. They’re protecting themselves.
The NOK play is not a straight up short squeeze. The play is HELPED by the shorts that are there, as long as we can keep the demand up and keep the price up against the dumping, but that’s all.
NOK is a healthy company, with new and important tech, a great brand, a lot of potential. You want to see why, read the original post. ANYONE who sees a company like that being dumped for NO REASON would buy. So should you. They are only dumping it because they’re trying to fuck up our play.
Ok that’s enough for now. I’ll see you all when I’ve got my space boots on, in my house on the FUCKING MOON, next to a NOKIA Comms tower, or I’ll see you in VALHALLA with my broke ass. If this doesn’t work, then at least you TOOK ON THE MOTHERFUCKERS and EARNED A PLACE at the table with FUCKING ODIN. UNBREAKABLE 3310! ORIGINAL POST (28 Jan): I get it, it’s not the play. I’m not saying sell your GME. I’m not a bot or a spy or a wall street asshole. I’m a regular guy who’s got a couple of bucks in his bank account and plays videogames and wants a fucking house to live in like my parents had when they were young. If you don’t agree with me, just say so. I’m also not a financial advisor, so make up your own minds you autistic fucks. But, BUT, yesterday we did something they’ve never seen. Yesterday, we made them run out of NOK shares. That’s what that big spike was, and that’s why trading was stopped for 2h. If we keep doing that, it will be the biggest wall street wealth transfer from assholes to retards in history. Because they will keep dumping it until it’s too late. Impossible, you say. Too many shares, you say. Well listen up. Yesterday, in ONE DAY, we traded, or caused others to trade, 1bn shares of Nokia. That is 1/5 of all the Nokia shares in the world. That’s never happened, EVER. Not even when Nokia was the biggest phone company in the world. 3516.16% of average trading volume. Do you get it? They’ll keep dumping their stock, we keep buying them cheap, and then they won’t be so cheap anymore when they try to buy back in. We can move 1bn shares IN A DAY. ONE DAY. 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀 Why do they stop trading in NYSE? Cos they ran out of shares temporarily and they don’t want “artificial” spikes in the prices. So they made us retards wait a couple of hours while some assholes called some other assholes to unload their shares into the market, and once they had enough, they started again. That’s why that spike went down right after the freeze. But then we did it again. And they had to stop again. The price just wouldn’t go down. The assholes who’d just unloaded shares were probably back on the phone with the other assholes who’d convinced them. Everyone is watching us. What we do, millions of normal folks do with us, and every wallstreet asshole does against us. What did the asshole brigade do? They started shorting NOK. They will continue to do that, because they think we’re retards (they are correct). But how come the price didn’t go down? It’s got 5bn shares, and everyone whos ever held it was dumping it. How could we ever keep up the demand when there are so many shares out there? How is this going to work? Because the retard brigade was buying it. There’s 3m of us and counting. If we each put 600 bucks on NOK, we get 100 shares, and that’s 300m shares. Now imagine what happens if we put 6000 on it. AND. FUCKING. HOLD. And every dip you see, you buy more. AND. FUCKING. HOLD. They'll keep dumping, we keep buying, until they realize the price isn't going down. Then they start buying, we keep holding, the market runs out of NOK. Price skyrockets. And normies outside were following us. They can see that the stock is still LOW, lower than 2016. This means they don’t think it’s a bubble that’s going to crash on them. So why do the normies follow us on this, and not on GME? (I’m not saying sell GME). Because GME has never, ever been anywhere near where it is now. That scares a normal guy who’s just trying to put in some savings for his family. They think this is some Dutch tulip market shit. Not so with NOK. Even with the spike from yesterday, NOK is still DOWN from 2016. Remember 2016? Remember that being a really big year for Nokia? No, me neither. And let’s not even get started on where it has been in the past. Yesterday's spike barely shows on the graph. You know what is going to be a big year? 2021 and 2022. Why? What else did NOK say yesterday? Well, they revealed that they have a new kind of 1 terabit data transfer networks shit, what do I know, I’m not a techie. But it IS a new kind of technology that’s going to kick 5Gs ass. And my fellow retards of the most honorable retard brigade – Do you think we’re going to need more data this year than last year? Remember how Netflix had to downgrade its picture quality in March because the networks couldn’t handle the amount people were streaming? What do you think is going to happen with the company that solves that? But why would NOK be the company? Well, remember the 5G war with China? US and Europe can’t buy 5G from China, because then China has our networks. But guess who US and Europe aren’t afraid of? Fucking FINLAND. Finland, the land of NOKIA. So tiny that some people think the whole country is a conspiracy theory and doesn’t really exist. Sorry Finnish people, nobody gives a shit about you. Good thing for you, cos you get to build the 5G network on the moon and shit because nobody is scared that Finland will take over the world. Want proof? They are literally building one on the FUCKING MOON: https://www.nokia.com/about-us/news/releases/2020/10/19/nokia-selected-by-nasa-to-build-first-ever-cellular-network-on-the-moon/ And we’re going to send them there. 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀 But hang on, why is NOK so low in the first place if it’s so great? Answer: because Microsoft fucked them. That’s right, they sent one of their own assholes to infiltrate the NOK, leak a bunch shit to drive the share price down, and then buy the phone part of the company. These assholes wrecked the company, the Finnish economy, and every middle class shareholder who was just trying to put their kids to college. Imagine everyone who’d be fucked if someone did that to Apple now. Worked like a charm. Firesale. Business restructuring. Lost their phones. NOK never recovered. The asshole they sent from Microsoft? Went back to work for Microsoft, and was paid a shit ton of money for what he did. His name is Stephen Elop. Look it up. So they have tech that nobody else has and a brand that everyone recognizes. But what don’t they have? Money. That’s why they’re building this 1tb magic network thing in tiny fucking possibly fake Finland to show everyone it works. But if we drive the share price up, do you think that’s going to change? So FUCK IT. I’m in for every penny, and I am HOLDING. I’ll see you in my house ON the MOON next to a NOKIA Comms tower, or I’ll see you in VALHALLA you BEAUTIFUL RETARDED MOTHERFUCKERS. TL;DR: NOK is literally going to the moon. Go there with them. 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀
BB -- Blackberry AWS -- Amazon Web Services IVY -- Intelligent Vehicles Yo. I don't actually know if this stands for anything QNX -- Quick-Unix perhaps? It's a Unix-like embedded microkernel RTOS (real-time operating system) EOY -- end of year PT -- price target SP -- stock price EV -- electric vehicle SoC -- System on a Chip IoT -- Internet of Things TL;DR: Blackberry ($BB) is almost daily announcing new partnerships and new clients for their software, including new deals with companies that are just now or just this year launching autonomous vehicles that run on QNX software. The big kahuna of all these deals is BB's recent partnership with Amazon to go 50/50 into BB's software IVY, a scalable cloud-connected software platform designed for intelligent vehicle data gathering and data sharing. With Amazon's Jeff Bezos stepping down, and Andy Jassy filling his shoes, who was the CEO of AWS, BB will have some very firm support behind Amazon's new CEO. BB and Amazon are having a webinar Feb. 23rd about their partnership and IVY, which should be a strong catalyst moving forward. IVY beta earnings are projected to begin impacting BB's Q3 or Q4 earnings beginning in November this year, with IVY fully being integrated around the 2023 timeframe. Through a lot of reading and analysis, I believe BB has a four-tiered business model dating back as far as 2013 when BB's CEO John Chen was hired to begin the massive BB turnaround process. Tier 1 was development of QNX and IVY, lasting from 2013 to today and onward, however, Tier 2 overlaps Tier 1. Tier 2 was customer acquisition, primarily distributing their secure software in QNX, SecuSuite, Spark, and AtHoc. They secured 37 automakers during this time, including 9 of the top 10 automakers, over 106 governments from around the world, including all of G7 governments and 18 of G20 governments, as well as 77% of Fortune 100 companies, including partnerships with Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Sony, XPENG, XPEV, NVIDIA, Intel, Qualcomm, Baidu, IBM, LG, Samsung, and others. Well if they have such an incredible market share, why are they so undervalued? The answer is that QNX was not the end-all-be-all product. It was the base that the rest would be built on. Particularly IVY, which is the real money-maker. Tier 3 is IVY beta, and Tier 4 is IVY distribution and subscription revenue streams. So why is IVY the big deal and not QNX? They are both big deals, but QNX was never designed to be the money-maker. They are charging a one-time fee per vehicle use. There is a bigger goal here, to secure their clients as their customers for the bigger product in IVY. They also need QNX is to be a secure system in order for IVY to be trustworthy and reliable. And it certainly is secure. QNX has ISO26262 certification, as well as US government clearance, NSA clearance, and CIA clearance. The US government uses QNX and Blackberry products. Just let that sink in. That should tell you something about its security. Anyways, IVY will be used in autonomous vehicle level 4 and level 5 communication (note that QNX is level 5 certified... it has a business moat just in its security level and clearance), as well as EV and gas vehicle data collecting and AI-powered data synthesis. See below for more details on IVY. Wrapping up this TL;DR, BB is going to do well this year as IVY unfolds, but will do even better in the next 2-5 years. I have a PT of 25 by EOY and a PT of 80 by 2023 EOY, and a PT of 160+ by 2025 EOY TL;DR: TL;DR: BB go up, but go slow for now because IVY revenue not here yet, but big fast later. Make big monies, BB is the future tech that Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc will be building upon in the EV and IoT market
FAQs:
1) Why is Blackberry stock price going down? A: A few possible reasons. One, as of today the whole market is down. BB is connected to overall market swings as most companies are. Two, there may be some market manipulation by bearish financial institutions as there are a lot of calls expiring on 2/19. I would expect that BB SP to be volatile between $11 and $14 between now and then, and to move upwards after 2/19 and especially after 2/23 (Amazon + BB webinar). Three, there are bearish investors who still think BB is a phone company and don't understand the underworkings of BB's business strategy, their software, their patents, or their partners. Their revenue has been affected by coronavirus and has not been particularly phenomenal so far this year. 2) Should I invest now or later? A: First off, I'm not a financial advisor, these are just my opinions. Invest at your own risk. In my opinion, BB will see a large SP growth by EOY, anywhere from 50% to 150% growth by EOY. While revenue will likely not increase much this year, the partnership with Amazon and news regarding IVY will likely create new floors for their SP much higher than the current SP right now, at around the $12 SP 3) What's stopping competitors from building a similar product and hurting BB's business? A: There's a lot of reasons why BB has a huge moat right now. One, notice the partners that BB has with QNX. They've got all the big boys working them, aside from Apple and Tesla. Seeing as SpaceX runs on QNX, and seeing that Apple was trying to make a deal with Hyundai that did not go through, I think it is still possible that either Tesla or Apple or both companies could also make a deal with BB to use QNX as their OS system. BB worked to develop their QNX embedded microkernel OS for the last eight years or so. Anyone trying to step into the game now is far too late. Apple has the best chance of all companies, as it has its own OS and Apple knows security very well, but this still requires an entirely new system in order to work in the EV sector. Also, Apple announced recently that they would be developing their own EV, although they did not give much details beyond that statement. The likelihood that they are both working on the hardware and software side of this thing is slim given the large number of difficulties that come with certification as it relates to the cybersecurity software space. Regardless, I would suspect that either Apple or Tesla is the most likely to be competitors in this space, but neither company has successfully completed a certified OS system, particularly for the emerging sector of autonomous EVs. Tesla is currently building a Linux-based system that is having a lot of difficulty in passing certifications such as ISO26262, a struggle that has been ongoing for years now. They may achieve a product that passes these safety regulations and certifications, but the question remains whether this will be in time as the EV and autonomous market picks up speed, and whether competing companies would even be interested in using their product. In fact, any car company is unlikely to develop their own OS software because none of their competitors would be likely to use it. BB is the perfect business to license since it is not competing in the hardware sector for the EV market. This argument can also be used for Apple if they are also building an EV. 4) Why is BB's revenue so low if they have so many customers and partners? A: QNX has been licensed so far as a one-time purchase, per vehicle or IoT using their software. IVY will be a subscription-based software that also includes a one-time purchase. Thus, BB's revenue streams are somewhat unimpressive currently, but they are playing the long game. If my hypothesis is correct, it is John Chen's goal to lay low as software is developed and customer relationships are built. It's the same with the book market. It's the sequel that makes all the money, not the first book. QNX is just the first book of a series looking to hook in its customers with low costs before hitting 'em with the strong follow up in IVY. Additionally, in order to build a competitive business moat, it was to their advantage to not forewarn any competitors of their involvement and plans. Consider John Chen's work as a CEO in his last business Sybase. Chen worked as the CEO of Sybase for 10 years. For the first 7 years, the SP remained at around $10 a share. Three years later, the SP was at $100 a share. I suspect he is implementing a similar model with Blackberry. Chen joined Blackberry in 2013. BB stock actually dropped for most of the last 7 years, resting at a stock price of around $5. Now BB is at $12 a share. I would not be surprised if BB reaches $50 two years from now.
Blackberry Clients and Partners Automakers: Honda, Audi, Jeep, Mitsubishi, Ford, Hyundai, Volkswagen, Bentley, Lamboghini, Byton, Mini (cooper), Toyota, Subaru, Fiat Chrysler, Mazda, Nio, BMW, Porsche, Lexus, Kia, Land-Rover, Mercedes-Benz, Buick, Jaguar, Visteon, Skoda, Chevrolet, Nissan, Acura, Continental, General Motors, Baidu, Motional Other: Denso, Aptiv, Bosch, Panasonic, Harman, Bugatti, LG, Vodafone, Bell, Carahsoft, CACI, Telus, iSec, KPMG, Tableau, Qlik Major: Amazon, Google, Sony, XPENG, XPEV, Li Auto, NVIDIA, Canoo, Microsoft, Intel, Verizon, Qualcomm, IBM, LG, Samsung Major Investors: PRIMECAP, Hamblin Watsa, Ontario Teachers’ Pension, Vanguard, Harris Associates, ETF Managers Group, Wells Capital, Arrowstreet Capital, Kahn Brothers Advisors, Norges Bank Investment Governments: Albania, Andorra, Angola, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Belarus, Belgium, Benin, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Brazil, Brunei, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Canada, Congo, Croatia, Czech Republic, DR Congo, Denmark, Egypt, Estonia, Finland, France, Gabon, Germany, Ghana, Gibraltar, Greece, Guadeloupe, Hong Kong, Hungary, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Kuwait, Latvia, Lesotho, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macau, Macedonia, Malawi, Malaysia, Mali, Malta, Marthinique, Mauritania, Mauritus, Mayotte, Mexico, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Netherlands, Netherlands Antilles, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Oman, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Russia, Réunion, Saint Barthélemy, Saint Martin, San Marino, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Swaziland, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tanzania, Thailand, Togo, Turkey, USA, Uganda, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, Uruguay, Vatican City, Western Sahara, Zambia, Zimbabwe
Blackberry Current Revenues:
BlackBerry Revenues: How Does BlackBerry Make Money? -- Trefis This display the biggest bearish argument to BB. Until IVY begins producing new revenue streams, BB is likely to not exponentially increase revenue streams, but only sustain moderate YoY growth
Blackberry Analysis Regarding Infotainment and Google and Ford Deal:
see "Blackberry (BB) Stock News Analysis | What I need to say..." by Financial Live by LEYA on the forbidden video website The media recently picked out a story that left out a lot of pertinent information, making it seems that BB lost Ford as a client. This is not true. QNX is designed to be a SoC. This means that other operating systems, such as Linux or Android, can be easily added to QNX. It is in fact encouraged. The Ford and Google deal was simply announcing the Ford would be using Android as their infotainment system. I believe that BB was never intended to try and be the predominant entity for all software systems in EVs or IoTs, but the backbone that connects all together, and to protect all components in a secure system. Autonomous EVs and even regular EVs in general would not be possible without a secure system protecting the product, as is true with IoTs. This is also why things like US Fighter Jets run on... you guess it, QNX. Ford is still using QNX. It is simply also now using Android that is running on top of QNX more commentary on this: Analyzing Blackberry Bear Argument - Case No. 1: Ford Deal
Image This is an interesting one to be sure. Facebook was being evil, like the do, and were caught using a number of BB patents. They settled in February, and the day that the settlement was finalized, John Chen (BB CEO) tweeted reminding everyone that BB is used on the ISS https://twitter.com/JohnChen/status/1358853064153784321?s=20 Well, the connection and speculation here is that Blackberry is going to the moon, and that the settlement is rather significant. Someone else also dug out some information in Facebook's most recent 10-K, specifically a portion for a 'non-cancelable contractual commitment' of an amount of $7500 million dollars. That's 7.5 billion btw. We don't know how big the settlement is, but it is worth noting that BB's entire market cap is 7.5B. I highly doubt that a settlement would reach such lofty numbers, but it could be possible that FB settled for some initial amount of $1B or so, as well as $1B in reoccurring payments over several years. We won't know until March 15th actually, so stay tuned.
Blackberry New Partnerships
Within the last few weeks, Blackberry has announced a stronger partnership with Baidu (China's Google), as well as their involvement with Baidu choosing to use QNX for their autonomous vehicles that will be hitting the road, as early as this year and next. BB has also announced their involvement with Motional, a joint venture between Hyundai and Aptiv, which will use QNX for their autonomous vehicles. Motional will be partnering with Lyft to use autonomous vehicles to begin serving customers and will be deploying their vehicles in 2023. It was also announced that QNX will be working with AOSP (Android Open Source Project), as well as announcing yesterday that QNX Hypervisor 2.2 is now released, which is what allows Android and Linux to run on top of QNX. A sum-up of all the recent news on $BB
Rumor: Blackberry Buyout? Here's why that's not happening:
Just read this post. It's quite revealing: Great Day for BB despite stick dipping. TL;DR: Amazon could have easily bought BB. Why didn't they? Well, all the big players are interested in this EV and IoT emerging sector. This is the new wave of technology that will dominate the market. First we had the dot.com boom, then the cell-phone and smart-phone market, and now we have the autonomous EV and IoT market. If Amazon were to buy BB, they would have to submit a tender offer. This would be a red flag to all the big players that Amazon were trying to buy up the best security out there. It would be a bidding war that could result in a double-digit multi-billion dollar buyout. It was much more to their advantage to create a secret alliance with BB and establish a 50/50 partnership, whose contract includes exclusivity for their use of IVY. Ouch! That's gotta hurt. This is where the importance of QNX lies. BB will be able to pull the rug out from any company that chooses to use something other than IVY. No IVY, no QNX, no EV. It will be a package deal where IVY is the big money maker. All other companies will have to build from the ground up or be forced to license QNX and make their money off of other sectors, such as the infotainment sector, as Google has already begun to do with the Ford deal. When this deal happened, the other big boys wet their pants realizing they needed to get into this space, and fast. Microsoft partnered with Cruise/GM. Apple tried to partner with Hyundai, who was so flattered, they may have initially said yes or indicated so, before realizing that they were already partnered with BB, so it was a no-go. Not sure if that is fact or fiction, but it is an interesting proposal.
Blackberry IVY + AWS Partnership:
Alright, so what's the deal with IVY? Why is it going to be so profitable? Why is IVY the real money-maker, while QNX has been used as the customer-acquisition software tool? Check out this picture: Image For one, IVY is designed for real-time communication between EVs or other IoTs. Autonomous driving level 5 requires vehicles to communicate with one another. This is where IVY comes in. IVY connects the different software components of an EV (which presumably are running on QNX), as well as harvesting data on those systems. The data used can be distributed for a wide-variety of uses, including, but not limited to, automakers and suppliers, app developers, consumer services, smart cities, EV charging providers, insurance companies, and vehicle maintenance providers. All of these different sectors will be willing to pay subscriptions for these data services, as well as the automakers and IoT makers who will also be willing to pay subscriptions for IVY. For instance, IVY can help share information between vehicles that will allow for a car detecting ice roads in one area so that other cars using IVY can take a different route. This results in less crashes, which helps the automakers. Insurance companies can use data from all these different data points as well, allowing them an inside-view of their clients. The list of what is possible here is inexhaustible. As for price points, the subscription models for multiple outside companies wanting to use the data will be create huge revenue streams for BB. With Amazon as a 50/50 partner, and with their resources and strategic management, BB will be poised to be the foundation in security and data sharing for the entire EV, and somewhat of the IoT market (the IoT market has more competitors for sure) see "Is BlackBerry Stock Undervalued?" by Wealthy Mindset on the forbidden video website see "Roadmap to $180 a share (BlackBerry Stock)" by Wealthy Mindset on the forbidden video website
Revenue, revenue, revenue...
Blackberry is poised to be an industry leader in EV, government, and IoT security and data sharing with products such as QNX, IVY, Spark, and their other software products. Stock price will likely stay somewhat stunted until IVY revenue begins picking up. It is possible that more announcements and marketing related to IVY will make this growth more rapid. In my opinion, either way BB over the next 5 years will 10x. The question is whether you want to get in now at $12 / share or two years from now at $40 a share or something similar, assuming that either way this stock is going to push for that 100B market cap (it's currently at 7B). There will be bearish analysts that will continue to say that Blackberry is a worthless company until those IVY revenue streams begin to come in. It is also possible that a realistic competitor may emerge within the next three years, such as Tesla or Apple. But if Apple is seeking to create its own EV product, then both companies will have a hard time finding any way to license their software to any other company. It remains possible that Apple and/or Tesla may strikes deals with BB as well in order to be able to produce autonomous vehicles and get a bite of that market share
Really, no competitors?
Well it's called a business moat for a reason. As we have recently seen, QNX is working with AOSP, and so clearly, they are not to be worried about. Tesla is not a true competitor as their OS product is not certified yet, and has demonstrated difficulty in doing so, and additionally, other automakers will not want to benefit their competitors by using their product. A third-party non-auto-maker will be much more desirable. Other companies such as VxWorks, have a lot of to prove both in security and certifications, as well as producing an OS product that is compatible with an emerging autonomous level 5 EV market. QNX's embedded microkernel RTOS is very much unique in this regard. This type of system allows for real-time processing and power distribution, while protecting the system from attacks. In an embedded microkernel system, if one part of the system is attacked, the whole system will not shut down, in layman's terms. This is essential for the security of any high-risk product that is built upon an underlying software that controls that different components of the system.
Conclusion:
All eyes are turned towards Blackberry right now. People want to know what this deal with Amazon will look like, how it will work, what they will focus on, (will Amazon also use this system for a fleet of delivery drones? hmmm), what the revenue streams will look like, what are their projections, what markets and sectors are they targeting, what are their future goals, what will Amazon be doing on their end, etc, etc. The Amazon + BB webinar may answer some of those questions, or maybe they won't. Time will tell (Feb. 23rd, specifically -- here's a link to sign up and watch: Next-Gen Vehicle Architectures Unlock Unprecedented Opportunities for Automakers). Also look out for that FB settlement numbers on March 15th, and Q4 earnings March 31st. I don't expect Q4 earnings to be particularly interesting unless they include the FB settlement numbers. Could those numbers instead be put into Q1 earnings for 2021? Possibly. Initially IVY beta is expected to begin being released late this year. I will also be looking forward to see how Apple and Tesla respond in the coming months. Ultimately, BB is a long-term play, but is poised to dominate this emerging industry with the partnerships and security focused software they have secretly been building. Now if only the could do something about their logo, some rebranding would be nice... This is not financial advice, just my own opinions. I am not a financial advisor nor a professional. I own 14k shares in Blackberry, as well as options (10x 8/17/21 20c BB). Do your own DD and fact check me as well
Friday 1/29/21 GME Expiry Date Means Nothing. Don't buy into the hype - shorts aren't just afraid of this Friday. Come down the rabbit hole with me.
Note: I am mostly summarizing the aggregate of explanations currently floating around about the 1/29/21 option expiry date. I don't claim any knowledge. This is not investment advice. Do your own research, don't invest what you can't afford to lose, and if something feels wrong it probably is. TL;DR: This isn't about options (yet), it's about shares, and Institutional Investors are playing a dangerous game by convincing us (some of y'all have bought in without realizing it) that a magical short squeeze has some 3-day time limit, that Friday is somehow the end game, and are hoping that when investors don't see a $5,000 short squeeze by next week they will fold and take their gains at a "reasonable" double-digit stock price. Don't believe them. They can survive through mid-late February before the true short squeeze smashes upward. And I'll be ready. I like this stock and believe in it's long term potential, and I think it's undervalued. THESIS: If institutional investors can (1) convince retail investors to sell stock at low prices and (2) convince their lenders to wait, then the 0.01% get richer. JUSTIFICATION: There is so much public sentiment (passion, enthusiasm, excitement, anger, whatever) surrounding short (~1 day) price movements*, and Friday's expiring options (these are also end of month contracts), that it seems like big clever money may be trying to artificially create a sort of bear trap for shareholders. Whatever happens in the next week or so (crest to $700? crash to $60?) almost means nothing in the long term, but could fool investors into giving these guys CHEAP ways out of their 140% float short interest positions. Remember, these are people who have been dumping tons of money for a long time, shorting the stock when it was in the single digits. They've been hoping for a GameStop bankruptcy, and manufacturing one as best they can. IT'S DIFFERENT THIS TIME: Remember the VW infinite squeeze, where we saw weeks of crazy price movement before the actual peak. And that is a mild case, as most of the shares were held by an entity with legal, competitive, and strategic reasons and obligations forcing them to hold shares and artificially reducing the float, or available shares for trading. This reduced supply caused the short squeeze. However, this time around we've got a huge short interest, much much larger by comparison than that from VW's 2008 peak, to the tune of 140% of shares available for trading (float). They've massively overreached, and are going to pay the price for that. But they haven't yet. SO YOU'RE SAYING THERE'S A CHANCE: This time, however, if the big dogs can shake shareholders hard enough, weak links break and paper hands fold and a fantastic long term play starts to seem out of reach. The market manipulation wins. DARE TO BELIEVE: Unfortunately for the shorts, GME has real long term prospects to revolutionize the gaming industry for consumers, and now has the attention and potential equity momentum (if they play it smart, which I think the new leadership will) to make this a reality. From that link above:
In GME's case the rise in the stock price itself will likely result in fundamental improvements to the underlying economic metrics of the company.
I believe. However, if the shorts can fight, sneak, manipulate, and otherwise adjust the share price down this week then they start to see light at the end of the tunnel. They make 2-3 week plans for doing the same thing. For them, prices don't have to bottom back out, they just have to convince enough people to sell that they buy thrmselves a few weeks before a short squeeze really takes them all under. *Some of this price movement is shorts covering, but much is actual legitimate investment between retail investors and other institutional investors who have seen the light. Remember, TSLA didn't get to where it is because one company made some bad short positions. But if GME shorts can convince everyone that a 3-day squeeze is all they get until GME crashes to some "normal" level, then they win. Everyone getting hyped about Friday is playing into their hands. Yeah maybe some will need to take gains after a Friday pop, but a smart long-term hold position on GME is what they're really afraid of. And I want to be a shareholder in GME's future, as many wanted to be with TSLA. And sure, maybe if everyone else thinks that way too, there may be an incidental short squeeze that wrecks the uber wealthy in mid-late February along the way. Again, I am not claiming to be knowledgeable or insightful, just commenting my best guesses. Nobody knows the future. This is not investing advice. 🚀
39 year old male here, single, living in a one bedroom apartment. Before the pandemic struck, I was overwhelmed with stupid collections I had to keep up for appearances' sake: video games, vinyl records, books. Also went to a ton of live hockey and baseball events as well as a few concerts here and there. Like some of you perhaps I panicked a little too much in the beginning of the pandemic and sold my entire record collection and turntable as well as most of my physical copies of video games ranging from NES, Genesis and SNES all the way up to PlayStation 4. In addition to that, I continued working at my essential job and just plugging away extra hours while reading up on minimalism. Thanks to life-changing apps and websites like Habitica, Acorns Investing, and undebt.it, now I have paid off approximately $8000 in debt in 11 months, and streamlined my media consumption so I'm no longer overwhelmed by what I should watch or play next. Not only do I have zero debt, but now I have a few thousand saved up for retirement via IRA (Acorns app) and invested in a mutual fund. I even made a few what I would previously have considered "frivolous" purchases in the meantime: I picked up an expensive snowblower, and bought some new clothes. Here's the bottom line: I had to teach myself to turn off those moments where you go on autopilot buying something. I would forgive myself later for a bad purchase emotionally, but I wouldn't do anything to rationalize it later like paying down a credit card. Sometimes I wouldn't even listen to the record I just bought, it would sit in the shrink wrap forever! Another strategy I had to alleviate some of the shopping tendencies I had was to go window-shopping on Amazon, meaning... I would only add things to a list and then forget about them and close my laptop. Months later, I would get the satisfaction of deleting it because it would be an item I didn't really need but somehow formed an emotional connection with simply by adding it to the list. I was effectively doing the same emotional roller coast of having bought it, not using it, without actually spending anything. Thousands of dollars sunk into hockey tickets, overpriced beer, all solved with tuning in on TV and going to a beer distributor exclusively. Thousands of dollars on vinyl saved by starting a Spotify account. Thousands of dollars saved on just admitting to myself -- "I'm not going to get around to this video game. I'm not going to get around to this book." Now I have some investment goals to meet.
My uncle left me a shifty little bar in his will. The employees here sleep in the backroom.
My uncle was an odd, lonely man. That one guy you try to avoid at family reunions, the one nobody knows too well but loves to talk about nonetheless. I think he liked me best because I never really enjoyed badmouthing him. I wouldn't say we were close, but we tolerated one another. At least that's how it was when I was little, we never bothered to stay in contact. I forgot about him by the time I left home. That's why the news of his death caught me completely by surprise. Uncle Mack was alone in his apartment when he had a heart attack causing cardiac arrest. He fell unconscious and died within minutes. Then there was me at the time. I had just flunked out of college and the only thing I was actually good at was playing video games. When I was contacted by Mack's lawyer, I was even more shocked. Mack had left me three things: a box of sorted letters addressed to me, all the money he used to own, which to me was a lot, and his bar–the one he had inherited from his father and had worked at all his life. I'll be frank, I had no idea what to do with the bar but I knew from the very start I'd take it over. I felt kind of honored–this had basically been Uncle Mack's entire life and he was giving it to me of all people. Sure, from what I knew there hadn't been many friends or loved ones in his life to choose from, but it was still flattering to me. Once I read the first letter, I was even more convinced. "Hi Giulia, If you're reading this, my bad eating habits have probably caught up to me. Or maybe someone killed me, who knows. As of me writing this, you're fifteen years old. You were the only one to talk to me at the family reunion today. Not for long, but more than just an awkward hello. I notice these things and I appreciate it. That's why I'm trusting you with the most important task anyone in this family is ever going to offer you. You are going to take over my bar. Besides, knowing you, you're not gonna have much of a career anyways, so you might as well. Once you're done reading this, please go to the bar at your earliest convenience. Take the box of letters with you and stash it away somewhere there. It has some valuable advice you're gonna need down the line. In fact, you will need to read the second letter right after your arrival. You'll find my employees are a bit special. Anyways, I hope you're doing alright, however this letter finds you. You're a good kid, Lia. Always have been. Besides, the only person you could possibly disappoint by screwing this up is dead so there's no pressure to impress. Sincerely, Your Uncle Mack." I wiped my eyes. They had actually gotten a bit watery while I was reading the letter. I folded the letter and tucked it back into the box before grabbing my coat and bag. Mack's bar was a train ride and a thirty-minute walk away from my parents' place, which is where I was residing at the moment. I figured I would probably have to look for a place close to the bar if I really would start working there full time. When I finally arrived at the establishment, it looked almost exactly the way I had expected. It was just another wall in the row of buildings on the street off to the side from the inner city's market square. A large, bright red double door with a neon sign reading "The New Saloon" above it. It would probably glow if I'd find out how to switch it on. At least I hoped it would glow. It felt weird, unlocking the door and opening it for the first time, all on my own. Entering and looking around inside felt even weirder. The New Saloon was your typical old-style dive bar. Even completely empty it looked overcrowded. The fabric of the cushion seats was stained and frayed, the walls behind and in front of the counter were plastered with neon beer signs and large framed photos of people I didn't know, some were even in black and white. The floors were dirty and my heels stuck to them when I walked further in. This place was small, shabby and smelly and I loved it. It was so strange but I suddenly just felt like this bar was mine, and that I needed to take care of it and protect it. Remembering what Mack had told me in his first letter, I pulled the second one out from the box and unfolded it. "Hi Giulia, If you're reading this, you're probably at the bar for the very first time! How do you like it? Let me guess, it's ugly and gross but it instantly started growing on you? Don't worry, it's about to get a lot weirder. You'll find the entrance to the backroom behind the counter. The lightswitch is on the inside of the wall, make sure to turn it on before you head inside because there's stairs leading down right behind the door. It's a death trap. Once you're in there, stand in the middle of the room. Stay away from the walls. You may then say out loud the following words: Spirits of this house, by the power of the spell that has bound you I command you to serve. You'll see what happens next. Whatever happens, keep in mind you can order them around. When all the work is done, simply tell them to go back into their room. You've got this. Sincerely, Your Uncle Mack." I frowned. That was odd. Was this the prelude to some kind of joke? I walked over to the door behind the counter and pressed down the handle. It swung open with a loud creaking noise and I began to grope around for the lightswitch. A single light bulb down in the backroom came flickering on and I proceeded down the rickety wooden stairs. No bannisters. Risky, especially with the shoes I was wearing. By the time I had reached the middle of the room, my heart was already beating faster than it should. Still, if this was a prank, Mack had been planning it for over five years, and I was not about to ruin it. Besides, no one was watching anyways. I cleared my throat. "Spirits of this house…" I began, a giggle swinging along in my voice. "By the power of the spell that has bound you I command you to serve." Nothing. Not a single sound for five whole seconds. I looked around the room. It was completely empty, except for a single door in the wall across from me. Maybe I had been supposed to say it in whatever room was behind that one? Just as I was about to walk over to it, a loud noise came from one of the walls to the side. I spun around to find that it had cracked open. Bits of it were beginning to crumble to the floor as the tear widened. I stared at it with my mouth agape, frozen in place and incapable of comprehending what I was seeing there. From the crack, a set of long, bony pale fingers reached out into the room, gripping the inside of the wall. My throat was too dry to produce a proper scream, but I couldn't contain a gasp as I staggered backwards until my back met with the other wall behind me. It was then that I felt cold palms rubbing against my neck and hands closing around my shoulders from behind. This time, I shrieked. I whirled around again only to see that there was a hole there too, long, skinny arms slowly moving forward from it, grabbing at me, searching for me. I glanced around the room frantically. Holes had opened in basically every spare spot. I counted four sets of arms pulling themselves out into the light, followed by similarly slender upper bodies. By the time I finally thought to run back up the stairs and save myself, the people from inside the walls were standing in the backroom, fully emerged from their dark hideouts. I didn't risk another look at them. When I finally reached the top stair, I dashed back into the bar and slammed the door shut behind me. I pressed myself up against it just to keep standing. My knees had grown weak beneath me and I was panting heavily, my mind racing. Then I heard them; slow, light footsteps making their way up the staircase and stop on top of it. I heard calm, steady breathing coming from the other side of the door. I tensed up and shifted my weight on my feet, leaning up against it to keep whomever was in there from getting out. I was sure this person would start to try pushing it open, but to my surprise, nothing happened. Instead, a voice rang out from inside. "Excuse me, who are you exactly?" It was a man's voice. I had expected something like a growl, or a hiss, or the groans of some decomposing zombie, but this was distinctly more articulate. It sounded almost polite. I didn't know what to do other than respond. "Giulia," I stammered. "Giulia?" The man sounded surprised. "What about Mack? Wait, if you're here…" He sounded quite sad now. "Mack's dead, isn't he?" "Yes," I replied quietly. "His heart stopped." "That's… good God." He fell silent and I heard him utter a shaky sigh, almost like a sob. "I'm sorry, would you give me a moment? I need to tell the others." "Go ahead," I murmured. "Nevermind, they heard us. So, will you let us out now or…?" "Who are you? Why were you in there?" "We work here, actually. My name is Andrik… I do most of the organizing here. I take care of the accounting, our profits, our spendings; I place the orders on most of what we need. Back here with me, I've got Bo, who is our bouncer, and Danika and May, both waitresses." "You work here?" I repeated. "And you live in the walls? After your shift is over, do you just go down there and melt into the room or what?" I couldn't help but let out a nervous chuckle at the mental image. This was just too absurd. At least I was breathing normally now. "Pretty much, yes." I shook my head. "What are you?" "Well, to explain that you would have to go exactly a hundred and twenty-two years back so it's a long story," Andrik replied. "All you need to know for now is that if you let us out, we'll get the bar up and running right away. We've been working under Mack ever since he took over this place though, so you'll have to excuse us if we're a bit gloomy." "No, that's fine," I muttered, slowly turning away from the door and carefully pulling it open. The man in front of me was of normal height, slender and looked to be in his thirties. Despite being dressed in jeans and a simple black t-shirt with the bar's name printed on it in white, swirly letters, he had a very official look to him. Maybe it was the way he stood, straight as a rod with a friendly yet matter-of-fact smile on his face. "Thank you," he said. Turning back to the room, he raised his voice. "You heard it everyone, Mack might be gone and while that's a downer, our work isn't over; so get yourselves up here and let's get this going again!" His tone carried the flat motivation the coach of a youth sports team might have. Three more people emerged from the backroom, all dressed exactly like Andrik, all of them that same content little grin on their lips. They walked by me offering polite greetings; the first one, a large, bulky guy giving me a curt nod and the two women that followed smiling brightly. The girls were a little younger than Andrik, maybe in their late twenties. Both had blond hair hanging down their shoulders in wavy pigtails. That first night the bar was open, I merely watched the backroom people work, following them around while they ignored me. It was eerie. They looked almost like automated mannequins, going about their routine by sticking to preplanned paths; like there were set directions painted somewhere I couldn't see. I soon began to notice other distinctive attributes about them. None of the people from the walls had fingernails. I saw it on the waitresses when they reached for the cups handed to them, on Andrik when he scribbled down notes. However that was not the only thing off about them. All those little details in their faces, the kind of thing you'd normally never pay attention to–they didn't add up. For example, their eyes didn't lign up. One was always slightly lower than the other, just enough for someone to notice. Their nostrils would differ in width and one of the girls' pinky fingers was the same length as her ring finger. Had I not known that they had just crawled out from the backroom walls, I would have chalked these harmless little oddities up to simple, inconspicuous deformities, but knowing what I knew, it made my skin crawl with uncomfort. I soon found out that Andrik did most of the talking for them. Bo rarely ever said a word, and all the waitresses did was whisper amongst themselves, giggle and chat with the patrons. Eventually, Andrik waved me over to him behind the counter. "Alright, to give you a rundown of the place, we have a cash-only system. We rely on our local clientele, but once in a while someone new comes by and then we try and keep them around, obviously. Here's some of our regulars." He pointed at a lady sitting in a corner, weeping over an empty glass of whiskey. "That's Shauna. Comes here whenever she can, only ever orders whiskey. Will not stop crying." His finger wandered over to an old, short man with an almost disproportionately large head and short white hair. He was sitting at one of the tables as well, talking to two younger women who seemed very much out of place. "That's Tommy. He's likely to start fights but he drinks a lot and tips very generously. Bo throws him out a lot but he's very easy on him, so don't worry." He finally nodded towards a tall glass of wine standing lonely on the counter right in front of us. "And this is Irene. She can't pay but she's always welcome. She's very nice and she's been here ever since Mack's family started this business." "Andrik, there's nothing there." The pale man threw me a confused glance. "What do you mean, she's right… oh! Of course. Don't worry, you'll start seeing her with time. Either way, for now there's actually not much for you to do except read up on barkeeping once you get the chance. However you should start getting acquainted with the regulars. After all, the owner of The New Saloon will always be part of the reason why people come here." He paused as his mouth started to twitch into an almost guileful grin. "I have a feeling they're going to love you." I retreated into the ladies' room for a quick break. I sat down on one of the toilets and buried my face in my palms. I had no idea what was going on or what I was supposed to do. Andrik had made himself pretty clear when it came to the instructions he'd given me, but all of this was so surreal I seriously considered the possibility of me having suffered some kind of blow to the head and dreaming it. I spent the rest of the night standing behind the counter and observing their every move. Andrik kept to my side mostly, looking at me with the kind of suspicion I probably had in my eyes as well. I couldn't figure him out. I accidentally-on-purpose walked by the waitresses who were talking to each other in hushed voices, picking up on small bits of their conversation. "Her blood is weaker than his. Do you think she's–?" "We shouldn't take any chances. Remember what Mack did when we tried to test him?" "I do, but this could be our chance to have some fun." Her words sent chills down my spine. Remembering Mack's letter however, I decided this was not the time to show I was frightened. "You're going to do no such thing," I chimed in from behind them. "I don't care what you are but I promise I'll find a way to make this whole thing very uncomfortable for you guys if you try to pull any kind of weird crap on me." The looks they gave me were worth my initial doubt. They seemed shocked that I had listened in on them at all, let alone spoken up. I glared at them, holding their gaze and ignoring the trembling of my legs. Their heads lowered, they marched off. When the bar began to clear out and we got ready to close down for the night, I told the four of them to clean up. Of course I helped, but I made sure never to lose sight of a single one of them. I felt like they were wild, hungry animals, waiting for their chance to pounce on me. Whenever I looked up from the rag I was wiping the countertop with, I would find one of them staring at me. By the time we were done, the place really did look a lot more welcoming. It certainly was cleaner, despite the four workers' angry faces spoiling the mood. We carried the cleaning supplies back into the small storage chamber next to the employee restroom before I went to open the backroom door for them. "Okay everyone, good job today! Thanks a lot, now back inside!" I called out, almost enjoying the feeling of authority as they came trodding towards me and made their way down into the dimly lit basement single-file. Andrik was the last one to cross the threshold. Right before descending the staircase, he turned to face me once more. "You were keeping a close eye on us," he said quietly. "That's clever. But you're going to need to keep it up and… let's see how long you'll last. Who knows what might happen." He gave me a sly wink with the one eye that was a little lower on his face before following his co-workers. I watched from the top of the stairs as they leaned up against the walls. It was almost as I had expected; their bodies seemed to melt into the holes they had come from, sealing them shut and not leaving so much as a thin crack. Lacking a better option, I stayed at a nearby inn that night. As bizarre and frightening as all of this had been, I got out of it unscathed. The bar workers and I would end up coming to blows in the future though, more than once. And I wouldn't always be that lucky. X Part 2: one of the regulars had a doppelgänger Part 3: My bouncer and I got beaten up by a little girl.
I was sort of shocked I couldn't find this data basically anywhere (or where it was available, it was usually only for a list of like 10 coins). So, without further ado, here is a breakdown of the current top 101 coins by market cap, grouped into buckets based on their usage/purpose. Note: Inevitably some coins try to 'do everything'. I limited each to only being listed once, so things are grouped by whatever their perceived or advertised primary purpose is, even if they theoretically can do more than that. (For example, probably 75% of the entire top 100 list has 'dApps' listed somewhere in their description, but it is not the main point they advertise on, at least currently, for many of them)
Store of Value
There's only one true asset in this category, and it's not one that intended to be here. Bitcoin was originally designed as digital currency, but insanely high transaction fees, changes in expectation over time, etc. have really morphed it into an asset more akin to gold or other asset stores. (AKA: It's an investment, not really for spending directly, and has limited other direct use.)
1 - Bitcoin
Digital Currency
What Bitcoin originally wanted to be, this is a category filled with Bitcoin spin offs and new tech focused primarily on cheaper, faster transactions. The use cases range from every-day purchases to more massive actions such as major cross-border intra-bank transfers. ( It's worth noting about half of this list also offers smart contracts as well ( or plan to soon ), but thus far have been primarily notable for general transaction speed/currency use. )
This is going to be a long list. Smart contracts/dApps are pretty clearly the most exciting 'generic' use for Blockchain/Crypto Currencies by many people's viewpoint, opening the doors for a lot of unique applications and financial structures. Essentially everyone in this category is gunning for Ethereum's spot, and the competition is hot and heavy all the way down the top 100 list, with every entry trying to put their own spin on it.
These are tokens that attempt to stay pegged to some real world kind of value (generally USD) via various methods. Pretty straight forward, and mostly varies by what network/exchange you're on.
These are tokens that primarily are associated with some kind of crypto-currency exchange, either Centralized(CEX) or Decentralized(DEX). A few of them also try to serve other purposes (Usually as Digital Currencies), but at heart being used as an exchange token is their most notable point, and they will largely rise and fall based on the success of their related exchange.
These are tokens that are related to the crypto trading markets, but aren't really proper exchange tokens. Basically for exchange-esque activities, or offering only a specific, narrow type of alternative trading.
These tokens/networks exist primarily to solve the problem of communicating between different blockchain networks/the non-blockchain world, and the transfer of assets across said barriers. (Ex. The Oracle Problem)
These tokens and networks focus around making trustless lending and banking (savings accounts) possible, and yield-farming via said lending. Generally speaking, they work via encouraging users to stake/lock up digital collateral from other networks into their own, giving the users the network's own tokens as the loan balance and/or paying the user tokens for other users borrowing their assets.
Fairly self explanatory, these primarily exist to keep as much data about the network/transactions/wallets as anonymous as possible. They've obviously gotten a bad rep at times as being used often for illicit activities, but there's nothing inherently wrong with wanting privacy either.
23 - Monero 50 - Zcash 101 - Verge
Other
These coins/tokens have largely unique use cases, that leave them without many/any direct competitors in the top 100. Whether they go up or down is going to be mostly based on if their use cases actually exist and if they can succeed in filling them correctly. A few of these are gunning towards long term moving into the more general categories, but at least currently book themselves as having a more narrow focus.
11 - Dogecoin ( Meme/Intro to Crypto ) 26 - THETA ( Distributed Video Streaming ) 30 - VeChain ( Supply Chain Logistics ) 35 - IOTA ( Internet of Things Logistics ) 37 - Filecoin ( Distributed File Hosting ) 49 - The Graph ( Distributed Search Indexing ) 51 - BitTorrent ( Blockchain-ifying the Bittorrent Protocol ) 57 - Revain ( Distributed Review Platform ) 68 - OMG Network ( Cheaper ETH Transfers ) 69 - Ontology ( Identity/Private Data Management ) 70 - Basic Attention Token ( Web Advertisement/Marketing Replacement ) 79 - Siacoin ( Distributed File Hosting ) 85 - Reserve Rights ( Stablecoin counterbalance token ) 88 - Stacks ( DApp extension onto the Bitcoin Network ) 93 - Decentraland ( Distributed Virtual-Reality Platform ) 94 - Ocean Protocol ( Data Monetization ) 98 - Enjin Coin ( Video Game Items/In-Game Economy )
N/A - Wrapped Assets
These are 'wrapped' versions of other assets (Bitcoin) floating around other networks for use on said networks. There's generally limited reason to directly invest in these when you could invest in their more liquid base asset. (Ex. You'd only buy them to use them in some specific DApp/etc, not just hold them in a wallet generally)
[Method] The key to discipline is to align the interests of your Present Self and your Future Self ---> By learning to enjoy the process
The reason discipline can be so hard, is because your Present Self and Future Self are on different pages:
Your Future Self wants your Present Self to do work now (in order to get positive benefits later)
Your Present Self doesn't want to work now (even if that negatively impacts your Future Self)
But what if there was an alternative to this mindset? What if you could align the interests of your Present Self and your Future Self? Here's how to make that happen: Learn to enjoy the process (not just the end result). If you actually like working towards your goal, that changes the equation. Now all of a sudden, your Present Self and Future Self are on the same page:
Your Future Self still wants the same thing: Your Present Self to work now so it benefits later
But Your Present Self has changed: Now, it wants to work too (because it enjoys doing it)
So, the question is, how do you convince your Present Self to enjoy the process? That's where things get trickier. Especially with challenging goals. But I've practiced various methods for how to learn to enjoy the process over the years. And am going to share the 11 which have proven the most effective. If you prefer to hear these methods in video format, check out the first post in my profile.
Method Number 1: Seek Out Intrinsic Rewards
There are 2 types of rewards:
Intrinsic rewards: Which are benefits you receive in return for the work you do that come from WITHIN.
And extrinsic rewards: Which are benefits that come from OUTSIDE of yourself.
Intrinsic rewards are the most directly beneficial when it comes to enjoying the process. That’s because they are benefits you receive from the process itself. Examples include:
The joy of learning.
Creative expression.
Finding humor in something.
The positive feeling you get from helping others.
Or simply the internal satisfaction from knowing you are doing something productive.
Next time you are pursuing a goal, think about whether there is anything you like about what you are doing. Or that you can learn to like. These things are the potential intrinsic rewards that you can start seeking. Then, try to focus more of your attention on the aspects you find intrinsically rewarding. And less of your attention on:
(A) The parts of the process you don’t like.
And (B) the ultimate outcome.
If it’s a challenging goal, finding something you like about it might be tough. But for most things, if you search deep enough, there is usually at least 1 thing you can discover that you like about it.
Method Number 2: Measure Your Progress in the Right Way
When done in the RIGHT way, measuring your progress has several benefits. Including:
Delivering useful feedback.
Helping improving future performance.
And providing inspiration.
But if you measure your progress in the WRONG way, you can get overly focused on the outcome. And when you become excessively tied to how well you are doing, you often start to get more:
Anxious
Worried
And self-doubting
Even when things DO go well, if you focus too much on results, you can feel:
Prideful
Egotistical
And vain
Which aren’t helpful emotions for long-term happiness. So, how do you measure your progress in a way that gives you the pros without the cons? Here are a few suggestions:
Measure the smallest increments of progress possible: This helps you find joy in every step in the journey. For example, if you are lifting weights, assess your progress based on something small like pushing for 1 more rep. Rather than something big like “gaining 20lbs of muscle.”
Don’t look at big picture success metrics too often: Every once in a while, looking at those broader metrics can be helpful to make sure you are headed in the right direction. But if you become overly fixated on the big picture you are increasing the likelihood you will get discouraged. Because often it takes a long time to get there. Especially for larger goals.
Use measurements to improve performance: Measurements are most beneficial when they are used to inform changes to your process. Used in this way, measurements can help make things more efficient or effective. Which will in turn make the process more enjoyable.
Don’t forget to make note of intrinsic accomplishments: For example, if you are writing a story and felt you really leveled up creatively, count that as progress. Whether or not your story makes money or gets positive feedback. Of course, the money or feedback may matter too, but you don’t want to discount the skill you’ve built. And who knows, it may pay off in the long run.
Method Number 3: Minimize Distractions
It’s going to be impossible to uncover aspects of the process you love, if you are constantly getting distracted. That’s because you need to be able to deeply focus in on the process in order to find things you like about it. So, if at all possible, try to create an environment where you can pursue your goals with minimal opportunity for interruption. For example:
If you are writing a paper, consider using an app to block distracting programs from drawing your attention away from the task at hand.
When journaling, do that in a different place than where you typically play games and watch TV.
Or if you are trying to learn to play guitar, perhaps you hide some tempting snacks you have out first.
The key is to think through your goals and come up with a plan to limit the distractions for each. Sometimes it also helps to meditate for a few minutes before starting a task. Meditation can help clear your mind so you are less preoccupied with things that might distract you.
Method Number 4: Give Yourself Credit for the Little Things
Another thing that can really help you learn to love the process, is to give yourself credit along the way. The key here, is not just to wait until you achieve your ultimate goal. Rather, to find ways to feel good about your progress continuously along your journey. If you want, you can even give yourself mini rewards after completing certain steps. And it’s totally fine if these are extrinsic rewards. Like:
Playing a game for an hour.
Watching a movie.
Or treating yourself to a snack you like.
These small rewards can help to positively reinforce the aspects of the process that you carried out. Which can eventually translate into intrinsic satisfaction with those components. Even if those extrinsic rewards aren’t always present.
Method Number 5: Journal
Journaling can help make you more aware of the specific things you did process-wise. Instead of just forgetting those details, you have a chance to reflect on them. And as you increase your awareness, you will have more opportunities to find things that interest you. Journaling can also help you process any negative feelings you experience. If you don’t want to officially journal, informal reflection can also help.
Method Number 6: Focus on the Things You Can Control
Depending on your particular goal and situation, there may be a ton of stuff outside of your control which affect the outcome. Things like:
Getting sick.
The state of the economy.
Other people’s actions.
And plain old luck.
If you are able to focus less on the aspects of the process you CAN’T control, you will have a lot more energy to devote to the things which you CAN control. Understandably, this is easier said than done. And in some situations, not possible. But the more you can focus on things which are within your sphere of influence, the easier it will be for you to enjoy the process.
Method Number 7: Don’t Compare Yourself With Others
When you get lost in comparing your success to other people, it’s going to be tough for you to enjoy the process. Since you are placing so much importance on your relative outcome. Comparing yourself can also produce negative emotions like:
Jealousy
Self-loathing
And resentment
These negative emotions can make it even harder for you to enjoy the process. Now, clearly, there may be some situations where you have to compare yourself to others a little bit. For example, if you are in a competitive situation, like playing a sport. But even then, there’s a helpful way and an unhelpful way to evaluate how you are doing vs. competitors:
The unhelpful way is to get demoralized because you aren’t as far along as someone else.
The helpful way is to break down what it is those other people are doing and try to emulate those tactics to improve your own performance. This approach allows you to still shift your mind towards the process, while also leveling up your skills.
Method Number 8: Adjust Your Process to Make it More Enjoyable
So, you may be wondering, what about goals where you simply can’t find anything about the process you like? In these situations, I like to try to adjust the process to make it more enjoyable. Or at least less painful. Here are a few ways to do that:
Increase efficiency: Find better ways to do things or to make things more streamlined. For example, once I had a work assignment in Excel which I hated doing initially. But then I was able to start using an Excel formula that made the part of the process I hated much easier. Which actually led me to start liking the assignment.
Mix things up: Sometimes you might be going about something in a way which isn’t optimal for you. In those situations, it sometimes helps to mix things up a bit. For example, if you are doing a diet which involves a bunch of foods you hate, switch to a different diet that allows tastier foods.
Integrate something new into the process: For instance, listening to a podcast or music during a workout. In some ways this may seem in opposition to focusing deeply on the process. But if you are doing something really difficult, it can sometimes be the only way you are going to truly enjoy things. I personally listen to podcasts or music during workouts on an “as needed” basis.
Method Number 9: Make a List of Everything You Like About Pursuing Each Goal
It can be very helpful to brainstorm what it is you like (or could potentially learn to like) about your goals. For example, here is my list of things I like about working out:
The endorphin rush I feel after each rep.
The feeling that I am using my body effectively.
The fun motions of doing certain lifts or movements.
Being aware that I am improving my health.
A sense of accomplishment from knowing I am working towards my goal.
Listening to podcasts or music (on days I am struggling to focus fully on the process).
Getting to know my body better.
Talking to the gym staff or other members.
Appreciating the times my wife and I go together.
Being a part of a community (both the gym itself and the broader workout community).
Learning more about weightlifting (including figuring out new exercises).
The relief and pleasure I feel in between sets.
And the biggest thing of all: The fact that I know exactly what I need to do while working out, and nothing else matters at that point. None of my usual debates over what to do and how to handle certain situations in my life. In that moment, I just work out, and that’s all there is. Keep in mind, I’ve been working on this one for a while, so even if your list is just 1 thing at first, that is totally fine. 1 thing you like is plenty to start with. Also, for some really challenging pursuits, 1 thing you like might be all that is possible.
Method Number 10: Practice
The only way you are going to figure out how to learn to enjoy the process, is to practice it. That’s because:
A) You aren’t going to learn to enjoy something you aren’t doing.
And (B) the more you practice it the easier it will become to enjoy it. Since the hard things will get less difficult as your abilities improve. And because you will discover more things you like about it.
So, whatever you do, get out there and give it a try! Learning to love the process isn’t going to happen from thinking about it alone.
Method Number 11: Don’t Put Pressure on Yourself to Enjoy the Process All the Time
Don’t feel like you have to enjoy the process every single moment. Unless you are a superhero, that probably isn’t possible. This is for a few reasons:
It can take a long time to figure out how to learn to enjoy the process for each goal that you have.
Focusing a little on the outcome in certain situations makes sense and is totally fine.
Some things are just incredibly difficult, and focusing on the process in those situations might be extremely hard.
All of this is perfectly natural. In a way, figuring out how to learn to enjoy the process, is a process in and of itself. And that is also something you can learn to love.
My uncle left me a shifty little bar in his will. My bouncer and I got beaten up by a little girl.
My bar is a shabby little thing. Not only does it naturally attract the weirdest patrons, it also never fails to surprise with just how dilapidated it is. One time, I nearly sprained my ankle tripping over a loose floorboard. The backroom people and I try to fix the place all the time, but it's like new issues pop up everywhere. We repair a lamp in one of the bathrooms and next thing you know, another one goes dark; kinda like that. It wouldn't surprise me if the building was cursed or something. There's upsides to it as well though. Sometimes, we find cool stuff while cleaning. Change for example, or in this particular case a shiny, thin silver necklace with a crystal pendant. Andrik found it while sweeping the floors. May's excited squeals were what alerted me to it. "Oh my God, it's so pretty!" "Weird. Since when do our patrons have jewelry on them?" Bo chimed in. He rarely says anything, so I remember being surprised at that. "Andrik…" May began, drawing out the name in a saccharine voice. "Can I have it?" "Sorry, all items found in the bar are at the disposal of our dear lord… I mean lady." He handed me the necklace and I held it up, considering it. "Well, someone probably lost it. We'll keep it here and see if they come back for it," I decided. "And what if they don't?" May inquired, a hopeful look in her eyes. "If that happens… then I'm gonna start wearing it," I said, smiling as her face fell. "I totally would let you have it, but I just don't like people who put up trip wires for me to fall over." May had pulled that actual stunt just a week prior and I'd almost broken my neck. "And that's why you don't bite the hand that feeds," Andrik told her in a hushed voice, though I'm sure he fully intended for me to hear. I know it's not good holding grudges but it was extremely satisfying. The backroom people love playing pranks. I'm used to it and Andrik isn't as much of a saint as he makes himself out to be–he once emptied an entire bag of potato chips over my head–but May's ones have always been a little more aggressive. A week went by as we waited for someone to return for the necklace. Then another. I eventually gave in to the desire to declare this sparkly thing my own and simply put it on one day. "Suits you," Andrik said curtly and with that, the matter was off the table. We all just collectively forgot about where it had come from. That was until I came into the bar one morning to find that all the chairs and stools had been stacked up in the middle of the room, one large, sturdy pile of furniture that kind of looked like a jungle gym built by someone who hates kids. I already mentioned my employees like to play pranks on me, but when I had ordered them to return to the backroom the night prior, the chairs had all been in place. As far as I knew, none of the four could leave until I'd wake them up again, so this couldn't have been one of their practical jokes. I rounded the enormous stack, examining it only to find nothing hinting at its creator. "Andrik?" I called out. "Are you guys up yet?" No response. They were still resting, apparently. I stepped up to the door behind the counter, pulled it open and turned on the lights. "Spirits of this house, get up already." I watched as the four of them crawled out from the wall. Just between us; sometimes, I make bets with myself about who will be out first. That time, it was Danika. She stretched her arms and waved at me before walking up the stairs, closely followed by the rest of them. "That's new," Danika said when laying eyes on the pile of furniture. "Did you do this?" I asked them. "Why would we do that? You'd just make us put everything back," Andrik replied. I shrugged. He made a good point. It was still fairly unsettling seeing as if it had not been them, someone else must have gained access to the bar overnight. We tidied up everything and Andrik told me not to worry. "Weird things happen here all the time," he explained. "Always have. It's probably nothing." "If you say so." That was only the first of many incidents though. That same night, the bar was pretty full for once and we were watching a game on that small flatscreen TV above the counter. I'm not a sports person, but since a lot of the patrons seemed to be paying attention to it, I got sucked in myself a bit. That was until the screen began to flicker and suddenly went out. I could hear disappointed groans coming from several tables and some guy shouted to make it come back on. Andrik shot me a confused look as he reached for the remote. Either of us knew how odd this was. The TV was the one thing about this bar that had never failed us before. I watched as he pressed a few random buttons, then tried to turn it on and off again, but it didn't react. He groaned and swung himself up on the counter with surprising agility, beginning to fumble around with the back of the TV. I don't know what he did exactly but eventually, it did come back on, transmitting the cheerful sounds of the game. "There," Andrik muttered as he climbed back down. I sighed and got ready to clean the counter where he'd stood, when suddenly, the loud noise of static cut through the air. I hurriedly glanced up at the TV again just in time to see a face staring down at me. I couldn't see much of it, just two large gray eyes. The rest was obscured by a thin white bedsheet the person had wrapped around their head and shoulders. Just a second later, the game was back on. I turned around to face the patrons. "Did any of you see that just now?" Some nodded and waved me off like it was no big deal while others didn't react at all. Andrik looked at me with his brows raised. I just shook my head. I decided I would probably have to stop jumping at every small thing happening here. If I'd end up only being nervous all the time, the people here would lose whatever little respect they hopefully had for me. As the days progressed however, these things kept happening and they got more and more extreme. I would find the tables turned over when coming in in the mornings. One time, five of the old bottles we kept behind the counter had been smashed, putting to waste some of our higher quality drinks and Lord knows we don't have much of those. Our electricity would keep having these little dropouts and while those never lasted, they would occur often enough to annoy everyone. Worse yet, I kept seeing that face. Everytime I turned on the TV or sometimes even my phone, the image of those large eyes framed by the same white blanket would flash up on it for only a split second. Then one night, Bo came up to me while I was standing behind the counter. "Hey, we've got someone sneaking around outside, I think." I looked up at him in surprise. "What do you mean?" "I keep hearing footsteps and the trash can behind the wall has fallen over twice now. I've picked it up both times. I also saw a person creep around there, a really short one dressed in something white. If you want me to go follow them, I could, but I'd have to leave the door unwatched." I felt a shiver run down my spine at his words. "Please check up on it. I'll keep an eye out for the door while you're gone." "Got it." Bo gave me a nod before disappearing outside. I quickly bent down to grab my uncle's box of letters from where I'd stashed it away behind the counter. I had admittedly been a little lazy with my reading; I had only gone through about two more at that point and neither of them contained any advice on what to do when you'd have stuff like this happening. I hurried to grab and scan a few random letters for information, only to find nothing. Upon realizing that if the bar spirits didn't know what was going on, Uncle Mack probably wouldn't have written about it either, I gave up and instead walked up to the door. I stayed there for a while, but I didn't make for a very good bouncer, especially compared to Bo. A look at my watch told me I'd been waiting for ten minutes already. I was starting to get concerned. Bo literally should have been back by then. Eventually, I cleared my throat and called out his name in a shaky voice. No response, except a strange noise coming from somewhere to the side of the building. There's a very tight little alley between the bar and the house it borders on to its right. It's a dead end and it's where the trash can Bo had mentioned was located. I figured maybe he'd gotten stuck there somehow and needed help. It was hard to imagine anything happening to him considering his enormous stature, but it wasn't impossible. I went behind the counter and grabbed one of our large cutting knives, concealing it inside my handbag before waving Andrik over and letting him in on what was going on. I told him if I wouldn't be back in twenty minutes, he needed to call the police but refrain from going outside himself. Thankfully, there were only three people inside the bar at the time, and they were all huddled up in one corner focused on a game of cards. At least they wouldn't notice something was up. I walked outside, the cold air hitting me like a splash of water. This didn't feel right. I tried to keep my steps as quiet as possible. Every time one of my heels met with the cobblestones below, I felt myself wince and the hair on my neck stand up. I had already buried my hand in my purse, clutching the handle of the knife. I rounded the corner and looked down the alleyway. What I saw made me freeze. Bo stood at the very end of it, right in front of the wall. He didn't move or speak, but he had visibly tensed up, staring only at the figure kneeling on the ground a little bit ahead of him. There, next to the overthrown trash can, sat a young girl. She was wrapped from head to toe in a large, white bed sheet, veiling her in a way that left only her head and bare feet sticking out. She was holding the blanket in place with one hand while rummaging through the trash that had spilled out from the small container with the other. My eyes remained glued to her for ten seconds which felt like an eternity before Bo suddenly made a surprised noise. I looked up only to find that he had noticed me. His eyes darted between the child on the ground and myself, and he almost seemed to mouth for me to get lost. The girl raised her head. Turning to Bo, she said in a very quiet voice, "Didn't I tell you to stay still?" He immediately froze up again and she lowered her head, once again focusing on going through the trash. Bo silently raised a finger to his lips. I nodded. She hadn't seen me yet. I didn't know why he was so afraid of her, but I could tell something about her was very wrong. It was not just her blanket, or the fact that she was outside without any shoes this time of the year, it was how she felt. When you have a person standing beside you, you can sometimes feel their warmth and you can see life in their eyes. It's an odd thing to say and I can't properly describe it, but you're simply aware of their presence, one way or another. This little girl did not feel real. It was like I was looking at something I wasn't supposed to see. It was this alien sense of unease that caused my stomach to churn. Bo slowly took a cautious step towards me, placing the soft soles of his shoes as lightly on the ground as he could. It looked almost like he was trying to cross a river by balancing his way over an old, wobbly bridge. When he finally reached me, he grabbed me by the wrist and began tugging me back towards the bar's entrance. That very second, the girl's head jerked around and she stared at us with wide gray eyes. "Who are you?" she asked, her high-pitched voice shrill and aggressive. She rose to her feet, pulling the blanket tighter around her shoulders, as she slowly took a step towards us. Before I could answer, her eyes narrowed and she let out an ear-piercing screech. She lunged at me, throwing me to the ground with a strength I would have never expected from her. I screamed with pain as she pushed my head against the stone ground and for a second or two, everything went black. I could hear Bo growling as he tried to pull her off me, only to be shoved away. The girl forcefully turned me over, throwing herself onto my back and starting to scratch the back of my neck. "Get off!" I whined. "What are you doing?" Suddenly, I heard a tiny clinking sound and felt something scrape my throat. That's when I remembered the necklace. She had been trying to take it off. Now that she finally had it, she crawled off me. I groaned, slowly turning around to look up at her. She was sitting on the ground beside me, staring at the shiny necklace in her tiny pale hand. She was incredibly calm all of a sudden. "Thank God… I've been looking for it everywhere," she muttered, talking more to herself than me or Bo. "If Mom found out I'd taken it out to play… if she found out I'd lost it, she would have been so angry." She slowly raised her head and looked down at me, something akin to a smile on her face. "Mom loves her jewelry. She hates when I touch it." With that she got up and, necklace in hand, jogged over to the end of the alley. She was heading right towards the wall and just as she should have been about to run into it, she disappeared. She didn't fade out or anything, but one second she was there and the next she was gone. I stared after her with my neck craned for a good two seconds before starting my first fruitless attempt to get up. My whole body was aching and I let out a small whimper. Bo rushed to my side and shoved his arm beneath my shoulders to pull me up, but he was rough and my sides flared up with pain. He apologized and ran back inside the bar, returning with Andrik at his side. I chuckled as I looked up at the two of them, tears of pain in my eyes yet at the same time weirdly amused by the sheer absurdity of my situation. "What happened?" Andrik asked softly, leaning down to help me get to my feet. "Ask Bo later," I muttered, whining as he propped me up. "Didn't you have a necklace on you?" "Wasn't mine. Gave it back." The two of them half-lead, half-carried me inside The New Saloon. I contemplated going to the hospital, but then again, nothing was broken and as far as I could tell, it was just bruises. We closed down early for the night and I sat down in one of the cozier corner booths. I didn't get up until morning. I really did end up spending the night in my shabby little bar, my head resting on a table the backroom people had thankfully cleaned for me. It was nice having them all be polite at the same time for once. I didn't sleep the entire night though. I asked Danika to bring me a pen and paper and then told them they could go into the backroom and rest if they wanted to. To my surprise, some of them stuck around though. Bo went straight downstairs while May stuck around to watch TV. I had brought a couple books with me and Danika had borrowed one on small businesses which she was reading a lot more diligently than I ever had. Andrik had sat down on the cushioned bench with me and was watching me ponder over my pen and paper. "What do you want to write?" "Since none of you knew about the little girl with the blanket, I've been thinking the letters Uncle Mack left me might need some additions." Andrik laughed. "You haven't even finished reading them." "True. But I hope whoever gets the bar after me will be more up to the task. And since you're here already, you should help me out. You knew about doppelgängers, so what do you think about this?" So now, there is a letter from me somewhere in that box among those that Uncle Mack left me. I won't transcribe it exactly since I just wrote down the better part of everything I know above, but here's what I added with Andrik's help: "It's possible she's a poltergeist, however she apparently isn't bound to any person in particular and has no trouble showing herself in the same form for an extended period of time. Poltergeists are said to be more likely to haunt a person than a location, which we're not sure is the case with her. She seems to have detailed memories of a past life, mentioning her mother as the reason why she was after the necklace. We don't know how exactly that got into the bar by the way but in the end, we're glad to be rid of it. So if you find any piece of jewelry in the bar that looks like it doesn't belong, just stash it away somewhere the girl can easily find it. Please don't make it hard on her. She seems really confused." It wouldn't be the last time we'd meet her though. X Part 1: The employees sleep in the backroom Part 2: The regular who had a doppelgänger
I made a couple hundred grand, mostly from upwork clients, last year and am happy to share the knowledge.
Hey all. No I'm not selling a course and I don't want your money. Just a fellow hacker with some tips & tricks for making money independently with your friends. Here is a link to most of the materials we used including cold call scripts, upwork guides, estimate templates, our offerings & portfolio (which we attached to all of our upwork proposals.) And a bunch of other goodies! I've always been good at getting jobs, so I decided to "start an agency" with my friends last year. That way I could "get jobs" as my full time job! It was a fun learning experience. Our goal was to be "a learning company" that gave people a chance to grow their careers working on freelance projects. We prided ourselves on our community ethos. We called ourselves Arcanium, which is a reference to the Arcanaeum at the bottom of the mage's guild in Skyrim. We wanted to think of ourselves as wizards. We even built an internal system of ranking the wizards according to their skill level with funny wizard titles (I was the archmage tyvm) If you start an agency, it doesn't have to be crazy big. It can be small. It can be you and a friend. Honestly, you'll have more fun the smaller your agency is. Don't go big! Take your time! Going big is much easier once you have experience and processes. Our goal was to each make enough to get by. We were happy if all 4 of us made 150k in that year. We exceeded that by far, and ended up working with somewhere around 10-15 people over the year. What a ride! I did (almost) all of the client acquisition via Upwork. The hardest part was getting clients, but I learned how to do it semi-reliably. There are a couple tips and tricks to earning over 100k as a web dev / agency owner. How I got clients:
You have to show that you understand business. Every time I reached out to a client, I reached out to them as a fellow business owner. I have tried (and failed) to start a few startups over the years, and I'm familiar with the lean startup methodology. I would explain to them how I applied this methodology to be essentially a lead technical person.
You have to present yourself as a leader. As I said before, I always branded myself as a tech lead. I had 8 years of experience at the time, mostly working for early stage startups, so I knew I could function as a project lead for early stage web apps.
Fancy proposals and a clean website. I branded my agency and spent time building a really great website, marketing materials (PDFs I would send my clients on proposals showing them how we work),My marketing materials are all on Gdrive
I would sell myself but always be sure the client realized my time was valuable and although I was the lead on the project, my agency would be doing most of the work.
I would basically charge for the initial consult (just a plan for how the project would be done), then I would ask them how many devs they want on the project and charge them for that. I would always recommend 2-3 devs. Some low budget clients would ask for 1 dev FT or 1 dev PT. That way we were always setting ourselves up for long term work and the client feeling like they had a "dev team."
Every project's revenue splits followed this general formula:
20% - Agency fee - goes to agency
15% - Goes to person who makes the sale
15% - Goes to project manager
50% - Split between lead developer and other developers in some fashion.
This wasnt the exact split in every case but it followed a similar format. How I built the agency and got developers to work for me:
I found people who had just graduated from bootcamps or were otherwise new and needed a chance. I offered to give them the help they needed to get up and running. When you believe in people and give them the opportunity to prove themselves, they are really impressive!
I gave them a share of each project (a % of the income) for their position. Also, if I'd hire a senior or lead dev to manage them, I'd give that dev a share. I always did project based revenue sharing because I wanted to always make a profit and to align my interests with those of the team.
I got a buddy who was a non technical guy who worked at a deli to do project management for me. The job changed his life and he quit his job at a deli. He basically just had to make sure the projects were moving along smoothly and talk to clients.
I would create a project plan and start the project from a seed project I had built. I would then deploy the FE/Backend on Heroku or Google Cloud kubernetes + cloudflare and pass the project off to my team.
I would always hire a "project lead" who functioned as the lead developer of a project - there were times when I couldn't be that project lead.
I charged the clients by the hour ALWAYS, not on a project basis. I billed every other week for hours worked. This way clients were always on the hook for paying and if a client didn't pay on time (within 2 weeks), we immediately stopped working. This prevented the serious losses on clients.
I always aimed to charge the client 2x what I was paying my devs. I mostly would do a flat rate. My sweet spot was $75/hour charged to clients to get in the door, but on the higher budget projects we shot for $125/hour.
It really helped the devs to know that I had their back and I was getting them the highest rate possible. I was really just being their advocate.
Having a mission to help the people in your company improve their careers is the only way this worked out at all. If I had been shady about pay or been overly greedy, people would've left me high and dry.
How I (mostly) kept my sanity
I didn't micromanage every project. The revenue sharing was there to give people intrinsic motivation to get the projects done. There was an agency-wide support system if people ran into problems.
I kept my mind on finding new clients and hiring new devs.
I hired some really great people and we kept a positive atmosphere.
I was willing to say no to clients and play hardball on compensation.
I read "Work the system" - highly recommend this. I built a series of internal documentation that laid out all of our processes so we weren't running around pulling our hair out. We used a CRM to track clients and used trello to manage the agency.
Challenges:
Clients are resistant to hiring an agency on Upwork. You have to really prove yourself and sell yourself. It's just a numbers game.
The first $1000 made on upwork is the hardest. When you dont have a reputation you have to lower your rates and do a great job. Good reviews are everything.
I am not a people manager and I didn't end up finding a great CEO cofounder. In retrospect, it would have been 100x better to have a CEO cofounder to manage people so I could manage the tech consulting side.
The mental burden of having people dependent on me (both clients and employees) broke me after a few months and I had to shut down the company.
Getting off upwork and transitioning to cold calling and bigger sales was a quantum leap. I couldn't hack it for the most part. I only got lucky doing this because of my connections - I recommend working with an experienced salesperson if you want to scale up big.
Overall, it was a great learning experience, we changed a bunch of peoples lives by giving them a resume booster, but running an agency is not for me. I'm now happily working as a tech lead on a startup which is successful, and I am so grateful to my boss. If you want any tips on how to get something going, DM me. I also have a slack group where you can chill with some other entrepreneurial devs. I have also published all my relevant marketing documents and my estimate documents to google drive which may be useful to you: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Qh-Qe5y7wELz-GpOi0nwcskQKEkWOu3N?usp=sharing P.S. If enough people are interested in the transparent revenue share model, I was thinking of building an alternative to upwork for building teams to match project managers / salespeople with devs and to assemble these transparent revenue-sharing-based agency teams. This would allow people to build their own agency brands or just work as freelancers for agency brands and get a cut of the revenue, without the bookkeeping overhead that goes into it. The app would handle the billing and automate the payouts and 1099 everyone involved. Food for thought. LMK if that sounds useful or not.
My name is Jared A. Brock. Having just turned 35, I sat down to reflect on everything I’ve learned so far and made a list of the things I wish I learned far sooner. None of these are rules or commands for you to follow, just personal reflections from a decade of journaling. I hope they save you a lot of time, energy, and struggle:
1. “Save the best for last” is terrible advice.
A French monk taught me this one. Every morning, I put on the newest pair of socks in my drawer. Why wear the rattiest pair? When I sit down to eat, I eat the tastiest bits first. Why let them get cold? After every shower, I put on my favorite clean t-shirt. I have a great bottle of 10-year-old Laphroaig scotch in my cupboard, but I probably won’t drink it for months because I received two bottles of reactor-aged Lost Spirits single malt for Christmas. Why? Because life is hard enough and we aren’t promised tomorrow. This doesn’t mean we should throw caution to the wind and “live in the moment” at all times, but it does mean we should try to find the golden middle and glean a little bit of pleasure from every day we’re blessed to live. “Save the best for last” is poverty-mentality thinking. It expects worse in the future. Enjoy the best right now — in your marriage, parenting, work, travel, faith, friendship, contribution. Keep all the chips on the table. Be ready at all times to leave without regret.
2. Tools use us.
A hammer literally cannot hit a nail without using a human. A saw cannot cut through a board without using a human. A phone cannot deliver ads without using a human.
3. Avoid false dichotomies.
When given two great options, choose both. When given two horrible options, choose neither.
4. Failure is overcome by one word.
“Next.”
5. Ambition is ruinous for your happiness.
Most goal-setters (myself included) live much of life in anticipation of tomorrow, and when that day arrives, they’re either disappointed by their failures or underwhelmed by their successes. Instead: trust the process. Whiskey, pasta, bread, beer, and cereal all require just two ingredients — wheat and water — but the outcome is completely different based on the process. Identity precedes action. Determine what you want to be, then find the process that will get you there every single time.
6. Forget what the market wants.
Listen to your gut. Your body knows the difference between good and great. Someone said you should never record a song or code an app or write an article unless it makes you laugh, cry, or orgasm. If an idea doesn’t move you, it won’t move an audience, no matter how “commercial” you think it is.
7. Give yourself a shove.
The best way to eat more candy, drink more vodka, and smoke more cigarettes is to leave them in the middle of the kitchen counter. You get it. Willpower is useless. Instead, line up a series of little nudges to automatically get you through your day. If you want to work out, leave your shorts by the door or your cleats in your fridge. My blue diode glasses rest on top of my laptop so I have to protect my eyes before logging online. I can’t not see my vitamins when I brush my teeth, or chia seeds when I reach for the Brita. There’s a book beside my bed, toilet, desk, and car’s gear shifter. Line up enough nudges and you can shove yourself in the right direction.
8. Grandma didn’t use toilet paper.
She used pages from the Sears catalog. Splinter-free wasn’t available until 1935. The Romans used sponges. The Greeks used clay. Francois Rabelais recommended using “the neck of a goose.” Arabians used their left hand. Never assume our extremely unique cultural moment is “normal.”
9. Ninety-nine isn’t enough.
Water boils at 100 degrees Celcius. The difference between 99 and 100 is the difference between zero and one. Not-boiling, boiling. Corollary: 101 doesn’t make it any more boiling.
10. Old people know better.
Honoring our elders is one of the most underrated practices in our newness-obsessed society. Sure, there are a ton of old crazy far-right conspiracy theorists, but there are also good people who have survived four wars, six recessions, and twelve presidents and are somehow still smiling. Get to know them. Also: meet your old-person self. I try to invent a new word every week — one of them is preflection. To ponder the present through the eyes of your future self. Take an hour in silence to listen to your eighty-year-old self. They might know something you don’t.
11. Fire all your employees.
The employer-employee relationship creates an unhealthy power dynamic between humans that simply didn’t exist when we worked cooperatively to feed our clan or village. I love my work life so much more now that I only work with independent entrepreneurs who are my equals. For me, it’s either a one-man show (my writing business), an equal partnership (my film company), or a co-operative endeavor. Life’s too short to be a boss or be bossed around.
12. Accept that you are a voracious locust of doom.
Nail a roll of paper to the wall and write down everything you consume for a year — food, toilet paper, electricity, car fuel, movies, music, social media content, other people’s time, everything. See what I mean? Saint Augustine said that the human heart can only fully be satisfied by one thing aside from God himself: everything. All the sex, all the money, all the power, all the possessions, all the glory. All of it. Nothing short of everything could ever fully satiate the human heart. We are wired for more. Understanding this truth is the first step toward real contentment.
13. Awkward is awesome.
My best friend says that The Office gave society a beautiful gift: the ability to embrace cringe. When you meet someone new and it’s slightly weird, pretend you’re Michael Scott. Just glory and bask in the discomfort. You can awkward-proof your life by being bold: Ask for discounts. Ask for refunds. Ask for phone numbers. Ask for pay raises. Ask inappropriate questions at inappropriate times. Lather yourself in awkward and pretty soon nothing sticks.
14. Happiness isn’t the purpose of life.
Hitler really was following his bliss by offing millions of Jews. I’m sure Jeffrey Dahmer genuinely enjoyed the taste of human flesh. Bernie Madoff seemed content to bilk charities for decades. Happiness isn’t the purpose of life. It’s not even in the top ten. Happiness is a seasonal fruit, not a foundational root. Find firm and fertile ground.
15. There is no ugly.
My grandpa re-proposed to my grandma on their fiftieth wedding anniversary and called her the most beautiful woman he’s ever known. Old wrinkly grandma? Yes. Because we choose our definition of beauty through our thoughts, disciplines, habits, and patterns, be they conscious or otherwise.
16. We are what we consume.
The statistical average American is a walking bodybag of sugar, alcohol, caffeine, porn, pills, and digital stimulus. Imagine how different life would be if our only inputs were nature, sleep, sunlight, organic food, and embodied human interaction? Guard your inputs carefully.
17. We’re going to die quite soon.
Make sure you live first. Practicing memento mori will help.
18. Fame is poison.
One in four Gen Zers thinks they’ll be famous by age 25. One in 3.9999999 Gen Zers are going to have a miserably disappointing life. Why do people desire the attention of strangers? Because we all need to love and be loved, to know and be known, but are too afraid to risk personal heartbreak to seek it out. Attention is not affection. Influence is not intimacy.
19. Boomers are to blame for half our troubles.
The Me Generation took a free ride at the planet’s expense and are hellbent on taking the rest of it with them. They’re statistically low on empathy — blame the lead, asbestos, and hairspray if you must — but at least acknowledge the reality that life is hard for everyone, and no one has it easier.
20. Children are dope.
Kids are the blood transfusion in our sick system. We need to stop manipulating, brainwashing, colonizing, and propagandizing them, and learn from them instead.
21. It doesn’t have to hurt.
Joy is a choice.
22. Watch comedy before calls and meetings.
Five minutes of gut-busting laughter will prime you for even the most tedious conference call. Your co-workers and customers all have tough lives like everybody else, so brighten their day by pre-brightening your own.
23. No ragrets.
Tattoo it on your neck. Most people play it far too safe. Instead: optimize your life for the least number of regrets and the most amount of selfless contribution.
24. There are better ways to vote.
I’ve manned several local voting stations, and I’ve also hob-nobbed with politicians in Canada, America, and the UK. The reality is that they don’t work for us. They work for their corporate sponsors and private interests. Democracy isn’t dead. It just hasn’t happened yet, with all attempts to date being stillborn or aborted. Democracy = one voice one vote. Athens wasn’t a democracy — women, slaves, and tenants had zero say. America isn’t a democracy either — no representative system is, because it’s far too easy for private interests to buy politicians. The charade of voting is illusory. All elections are sham elections. So what to do? Vote with your money and time and attention. One sham vote every four years versus tens of thousands of dollar-votes each year? It’s a no-brainer. My wife and I haven’t stepped foot in a Walmart in more than a decade because thousands of its suppliers are based in China, the billionaire heirs are anti-democratic tax-avoiders, and they treat their employees like indentured servants. Vote for pro-democracy third-party candidates if you must — just understand the game, and vote in the ways that actually matter.
25. Everything easy has already been done.
So run a little further. And if it hasn’t been done, it won’t be as easy as it appears. The question to ask is: what’s been standing in the way this whole time? Achievement is all about knocking down obstacles. Just make sure what’s on the other side is rightly worth the effort.
26. Broccoli still tastes terrible.
But you’re not a child anymore. Adults do hard things.
Discipline is great, but it’s also subject to the law of diminishing returns. Life is just too dynamic to schedule with military precision. Free yourself from the tyranny of “only people who wake up at 5 AM are successful.” All hours are not created equal. It depends on your sleep drive and chronotype. Know yourself. Unapologetically get more sleep, then do your best work at your best time in your best state.
28. “Freedom” isn’t freedom.
America wasn’t founded on freedom. America was founded on violent autonomy. The ancient Greeks had an entirely different definition of freedom: it was the ability to choose the right regardless of circumstance.
“We talk about freedom all the time, but we’ve stopped talking about freedom a long time ago. Now we’re talking about autonomy. Freedom is different than autonomy. Freedom has boundaries. Truth is one of those boundaries. And morality is one of those boundaries. Autonomy is the ability to do whatever you want whenever you want in whatever way you want. The problem is this: If I’m autonomous and another person is autonomous, and I have preferences and those matter more than the truth, and that person has preferences and their preferences matter more than the truth, when two autonomous preference-seeking beings come together and their preferences don’t match, who is going to win? If truth is on the bottom shelf, truth won’t decide. What will decide will be power. And isn’t it ironic that in our quest for “freedom”, someone gets enslaved?” — Abdu Murray
29. The Marines were right: slow is smooth, smooth is fast.
As teenagers, my friend Tyler and I were in a hurry to get somewhere quickly so we drove 120+ miles per hour for forty-five straight minutes before nearly crashing when the speed burned a footlong gash through the tire. By the time we replaced it with a spare, we were late to our destination by more than an hour. But nevermind driving. Pump the life-brakes sometimes, or at least, let off the gas. You might get there faster, with less wear-and-tear on the engine.
30. The quest for wealth is destroying life.
We’ve commodified land, water, shelter, clothing, art, time, and nearly everything else. Very little remains, and it’s amassing into fewer hands. We need a shared global vision. My invented word for it is benevitae: the sustainable flourishing of all creation. Our collective goal should be socioenviroeconomic sustainability. Where to start? We’d do well to let biology determine ecological sustainability and real democracy to determine economic fairness. Our current trajectory is worse than the Space Shuttle Challenger.
31. Most “leaders” aren’t leaders.
Celebrities, politicians, and book-hocking business gurus all call themselves leaders. They’re not. Real leadership is influence that serves. True leaders are selfless and servant-hearted. They put the best interests of others ahead of their own. Politics and media, by comparison, attracts sociopaths like flies to firelight. Never give power to those who seek it. Nearly everyone worth following is dead.
32. Divide-and-conquer is a business model.
Near the end of high school, dozen friends and I binge-watched multiple seasons of LOST in our friend Mike’s basement. It was one of the most hilarious, riotous, enjoyable experiences we had as a group. And it was the last show we ever watched together. People used to go to restaurants in large numbers, to the movies by the dozen, climbing over each other for one of the limited video game controllers, packing out our churches, cheering on our sports teams by the busload. We were almost never alone, and we were far happier. Now we order in, watch Netflix, stream Minecraft, catch the highlights, watch porn, and go to bed. It’s killing us. Resist the urge to be alone. It’s too easy, and it’s the exact opposite of what we really need. The #1 thing that’s correlated to human happiness is human togetherness.
33. Self-improvement won’t save us.
The great lie of individualist-consumerist culture is that we can improve our way to personal perfection and communal utopia. But it’s incrementalism at best. It’s just chasing infinity.
34. We know nothing +/-.
On the scale of all that is known, and all that is knowable, our individual understanding is essentially mathematically zero. The entirety of human knowledge is a rounding error. This is the beginning of humility.
35. The sun is not on fire
I was at an observatory in the Davis Mountains in Texas, and it was the first time I’d paid attention to astronomy since grade school. For three decades, I’d wrongly assumed the sun was a giant ball of flames. But there’s no fire in space because there’s no oxygen in space. (It just looks like fire because of how our eyes perceive light through the atmosphere and prism.) As I stared at the real-time image of the sun on the observatory wall, I nearly wept. The sun actually looks like a giant, boiling, grey brain. And then it hit me: I have so many assumptions to set aside and so much left to learn. So pay attention. Don’t worship the “question everything” mantra, but instead spend your life seeking truth, and wisdom, and understanding. You know what you need to do to get where you want to be.
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