By now there’s a good chance that you’ve heard of Bitcoins. If you haven’t, Bitcoins are fake money that some guy invented about four years ago, kind of like the bottle caps you sometimes use as poker chips when you can’t afford to buy real poker chips. Then, because playing the stock market was apparently not crazy speculative enough, people started exchanging this fake money for real money. Then, because stockpiling gold and survival rations was apparently a little too boring, people started investing in Bitcoins as a hedge against the impending global financial apocalypse. The price jumped from something like 4 cents per Bitcoin to $250 per Bitcoin in four years, which is kind of like me going from a salary of $40,000 to $250 million in four years, a performance-based bonus structure I have not yet managed to find. And then, people suddenly remembered that Bitcoins were fake money, and so the price collapsed by 70% over the last week.
If the world of Bitcoin finance makes any sense to you, then you should probably get into currency trading, since that only makes sense to seven people. However, as an homage to everyone who recently lost money in the bursting of the Bitcoin bubble, I have a few ideas to help you become as successful as all those Bitcoin daytraders.
Dive Headlong Into Things You Know Nothing About!
If you listen to interviews with billionaires, you’ll notice that they all tend to do one thing really, ridiculously well. They concentrate on media acquisitions, or high-end commercial real estate, or petroleum, or emu farming (not sure there’s a billionaire emu farmer, but you get my point). Which is why you should dabble unintelligently in as many disparate fields as you possibly can! The fact that so many do this is a large part of the reason that so many Nigerian princes have been anxious to invest with random Americans for the past several years. So if your background is in distribution, you should definitely override the opinions of your sales manager when it comes to devising a sales strategy. I’m pretty sure your experience selling old furniture on Craigslist counts for just as much as someone whose made a career from sales.
Ignore the Need for Market Research!
The hallmark practice of start-up businesses that fail to start up, although it’s hardly limited to new companies. My favorite story about this involves one of the major phone companies launching a huge Cinco de Mayo campaign in Miami to attract Latino customers without having done enough research to realize that Miami is populated predominantly with Cubans who don’t celebrate Cinco de Mayo! The point is, if you don’t know what you’re getting into, you’ll probably have no idea what you’re doing once you’re in it. And uncertainty like that will add a new element of zest and excitement to your life – at least until your money runs out.
Panic!
This is the culmination of the above, combined with the first instance of anything going even slightly wrong. If you have no idea what you’re getting into and haven’t even done a cursory amount of market research to learn more about it, then you’ll have no idea how to react to bumps along the way. Is it a hiccup, a serious problem, an opportunity, a sign of impending disaster – I DON’T KNOW! This will also allow you to do all the panic-inducing kinds of things you’ve always dreamed about: running around screaming, sweating profusely, making frenzied phone calls, speeding out of the parking lot, and racing home to gather the family into the car with what they can carry before the authorities catch up to you. And trust me, that last one is tons of fun. A great story to share with the kids when they get older.
Hopefully that’ll get you started. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve just been approached by a man I’ve never met to consider a real estate investment that sounds almost too good to be true. If I don’t write anything next week, it’s probably because I’ll soon be a millionaire. Good luck with life!
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