There are so many airdrop opportunities out there, yet it’s impossible to qualify for every single one.

Time and capital are our greatest limiting factors, and we only need this skill to get the best ROI from our resources:

Judgement.

Here’s how Naval’s thoughts on this important skill can be applied to airdrops:

We have to undergo the ‘trial by fire’ and get burned multiple times to realise what type of airdrops are a complete waste of time.

This happened to me when I was busy chasing every project that was mentioned on the timeline:

I didn’t know what to focus my time on (in 2023) and interacted with every one.

I remember spending countless hours on Magic Square’s Zealy quests that ultimately returned $24.

Judgment is a combination of:

• Intellect

• Experience

Even if we have all the intellect in the world:

It means nothing if we do not apply it to real-life scenarios.

That’s why we have to fail first and take lessons from every failure to hone our judgment:

We know what types of airdrops give us bad results so we’ll avoid them like the plague.

And we also know what gives us the best ROI and we’ll allocate more time and capital to those opportunities.

Warren Buffett is so wealthy now because of his judgment. Even if you were to take away all of Warren’s money, tomorrow, investors would come out of the woodwork and hand him a $100 billion because they know his judgment is so good, and they would give him a big chunk of that $100 billion to invest.

We should aim to become the Warren Buffett of airdrops and choose the right airdrops to interact with.

But we should avoid this, which clouds our judgment:

I’ve seen so many people complaining when an airdrop does poorly:

They would FUD the team and spam ‘scam’ comments on all of their posts.

But this takes up so much of our mental capacity that could be better used for other tasks (like finding better airdrops to interact with).

The more outraged somebody is, I guarantee you, the worse their judgment is. (Naval)

Till this day, there are some who are bitter over the ZKsync airdrop, likely due to a mismatch of expectations thanks to what was being said on the timeline.

But instead of harping over one failed airdrop:

I accept the loss and analyse what went well or wrong with it.

Win or lose, there will always be key lessons we can learn from every airdrop to adapt our strategy.

Each one sharpens our judgment and we become better at differentiating the good airdrops from the bad.

I see being emotionally detached from the result as a good way of taking emotions out of the equation.

We can’t control the result, but we can control the amount of effort we put into an airdrop.

And sharing your lessons in public could have this added benefit too:

These are more applicable to those who want to build a future-proof airdrop account:

Sharing both your airdrop wins and losses publicly makes you more credible (because others will trust you).

There are accounts that would shill any airdrop campaign with a referral system, and I’ve grown tired of following them.

And that’s how we can stand out, especially by explaining why we chose to do (or skip) a certain airdrop.

Judgment, especially demonstrated judgment, with high accountability, clear track record, is critical.

Once we have the results to back our thought process behind a certain airdrop:

Others will trust us even more because of the valuable judgment we provide.

It’s perfectly fine to share losses too because it makes us seem more human with our imperfections, and others would learn from your mistakes too.

So here’s how we can apply judgment to refine our airdrop strategy:

I see us practising judgment in these areas:

• Choosing which airdrops to interact with

• Filtering the noise from signal on Twitter

• What to post about on Twitter (to build our reputation or cash out on InfoFi rewards)

Ultimately, we can’t rely on the strategies that other accounts share:

They have different circumstances (time and capital) from us, so some of the projects mentioned won’t be useful.

We need to discern which are paid shills or referral farming and identify real signals being shared by these accounts.

These are the factors I use to determine which airdrops I would interact with (or skip) here.

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