The worst position in any game isn't being wrong. It's being left out entirely.

I've watched more people get ruined by being right at the wrong time than by being wrong with room to try again. They mortgaged everything on a single conviction, nailed the direction, botched the timing by three months, and got liquidated before vindication arrived. Meanwhile, the person who stayed alive, clicking, trying, repositioning, walked away with everything.

This isn't a story about perfection. It's about asymmetry.

You can be wrong seven times out of ten and still come out so far ahead that the three wins erase the memory of the seven losses. But only if you're still playing when win number eight shows up.

The obsession everyone has is being right. My obsession is not being ruined.

I know people who spent entire cycles trying to call tops and bottoms, agonizing over their hit rate like it was their GPA. They'd celebrate being right, then risk everything on the next call because, hey, they were on a streak. One bad bet later, they're writing Medium posts about "lessons learned" instead of managing actual capital.

The best founders, traders, and builders I know don't run on intuition. They run systems. Systems so predictable, so boringly mechanical, that you could set your watch to them. No heroics. No genius hunches. Just the same process, executed the same way, regardless of how they feel that morning.

It's like having a carrot juice IV running through your veins 24/7, you can see what's coming because you've removed all the variables that make people erratic. The future becomes obvious when your process is consistent.

This is why stablecoins might be the most underrated trade in crypto history.

Everyone wants to 50x on a memecoin. Nobody wants to admit that the person earning 8% on USDC while sleeping has outlasted ninety percent of the leverage cowboys who entered the market the same day. Boring compounds. Excitement expires.

Stablecoins let you stay in the game. They're the equivalent of sitting at the poker table with chips while everyone else is at the ATM. When the opportunity comes, and it always comes, you're there to click. You're liquid. You're ready. You haven't been ruined by trying to be right about the timing of something that might take six more months to play out.

Here's the thing about poker that applies to everything: having dry powder after being right or wrong is the equivalent of owning the biggest stack at the table. You control the tempo. You decide which pots matter. Meanwhile, the effective stack, the guy with less chips, is actually controlling where most people get liquidated because he's noisy and erratic. He's shoving all in on mediocre hands, forcing everyone else to make binary decisions with their entire tournament life on the line.

The person with reserves doesn't have to play that game. They can fold. They can wait. They can let the chaos liquidate itself while they sit back with optionality. The asymmetry isn't just in the upside of risky bets. It's in the optionality of still having capital when everyone else has been shaken out. The real edge is in being present.

Crypto is a masterclass in what happens when you optimize for survival versus validation.

There's this data that haunts me. It shows investor retention across crypto market cycles, tracking how many people exit after their first, second, and third wipeout. First cycle investors? About 70% gone after their first bear market. Another 20% leave by the second cycle. By cycle three, almost nobody's left. Meanwhile, experienced investors who've already survived one cycle show around 30% attrition in their next cycle, 60% by the second, 90% by the third.

The numbers are brutal but they tell you everything you need to know about this game. Most people don't survive their first bear market. The ones who do become systematically more resilient, not because they're smarter, but because they learned that survival beats conviction every single time.

This is why social activity and liquidity collapse so violently after every blow off top. Most market participants are first timers who leave after their first wipeout. They came in during euphoria, they leave during capitulation, and they never come back. The game selects for people who can take a punch and stay standing.

In 2021, I watched friends turn $10K into $500K, then $500K into zero, because they confused a winning streak with a system. They were right about ETH, right about DeFi, right about NFTs for a moment but wrong about position sizing, wrong about taking profits, wrong about the part that actually matters: staying alive.

The game isn't about catching every pump. It's about catching enough pumps over a long enough timeline that the misses become rounding errors. You can't do that if you're all in on every thesis.

I've been wrong more times than I can count. But I kept clicking, kept repositioning, kept enough in reserve that being wrong didn't end the game, it just meant reloading for the next shot.

There's this mythology around conviction. People worship founders who "bet the company" or traders who went "all in" and won. What they don't show you is the graveyard of identical bets that ended differently.

Survival isn't 'cowardice'. It's the highest form of intelligence.

Being assertive feels good, it signals confidence, it makes for great tweets. But the market doesn't care about your confidence, it cares about your ability to endure variance. And variance will humble every assertion you've ever made if you give it enough leverage to do so.

The people who win over decades aren't the ones who were right most often. They're the ones who structured their life so that being wrong didn't kill them. They kept their burn rate low. They took chips off the table. They built systems that worked even when they didn't feel like geniuses.

So here's what I've learned from still not winning:

The game rewards the people who stay in it long enough to see the asymmetry play out. You don't need to be smarter than everyone else. You don't need a crystal ball. You just need to not be ruined when you're wrong, and not get greedy when you're right.

Keep clicking, keep showing up, keep your system so boring that it runs on autopilot while everyone else is having emotional meltdowns about volatility.

Because at the end of the day, the best founders, traders, and humans I know share one trait: they're still here, still clicking, still playing.

And that's the only edge that actually compounds.