Why Does Everyone Make Crypto Seem Easy?

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Crypto is a giant money game.

Whether you realize it or not, you’re part of a 24/7 competition where the ultimate prize is not victory, but something even more elusive—attention.

To move up the rankings, you might have trained on your hard-skills, and do your best to showcase your genius and abilities to the world.

But focusing solely on your expertise is mis-understanding the rules of the game.

I grew up in the French Alps, skiing four days a week, with no other concerns than whether Olivia would ever like me more if I traded my skis for a snowboard.

As a passionate skier, when the time came for my first internship, I applied to my dream company—the one in charge of organizing the biggest freeride competition in the world: The Freeride World Tour.

And don’t ask me how, maybe it was Justin Bieber's hairstyle that made the difference, but I got the job.

Eliot: 1 | Losers: 0

I had the chance to travel around the world and attend the competitions live in different countries. From those competitions, something always struck me:

It wasn’t always the most technical guy who was winning.

In the Freeride World Tour competition, a score is broken down into five criteria:

(1) Line, (2) Fluidity, (3) Control, (4) Air & Style, and (5) Technique.

Pro athletes, compared to what you think, are not only judged on the quality of their tricks or their speed, but also on their ability to be effortlessly stylish. They can be the best technically, but to win, they need to do it with style. Or, to put it differently:

You win the game when you become so good it seems effortless.

Take Shaun White as an example.

He is one of the greatest snowboarders of all time. He has won the Olympics, broken records, landed huge endorsements, and become a brand bigger than any other snowboarder. In the three minutes per competition (all we really see from him), when he flips in the air and lands on the snow, his performance seems effortless.

But Shaun's success is almost entirely made up of the things we don't see.

In the recently released docuseries about his career, HBO included all of his biggest wins, greatest moments, and some of his training. But if they wanted to tell the truth, they'd have to show us the millions of fails he's taken, the thousands of almost-landed tricks, or the months he has spent in the hospital after failed attempts. It would be 5,000 hours long, and nobody would watch it.

But that's how long it actually takes to be the best in the world.

Winning the game starts by understanding what you see is part of a giant competition.

Effortless results are fun to watch because they’re aspirational.

We're lured by the fantasy that maybe, just maybe, we too can land the perfect backflip, write the perfect thread, or buy a JPEG for $500 and sell it for $200k. Seeing the persons we admire, it’s easy to believe the things they do are attainable. Easy to idolize their accomplishments.

But it’s hard to understand the price they paid for that success.

See, to be successful in crypto, you have to avoid scams, stay on top of new trends, invest in the right tokens, and build your brand on Twitter. You have to believe in the technology enough for getting over the opinion of all your friends telling you to quit, and build game-changing products in a still unregulated environment.

It’s easy, by seeing other succeeding effortlessly, to believe that there must be a “hack”, a way to replicate their success easily and unlock new opportunities.

But the true hack is boring:

It's just doing the work for longer than anyone else.

Shaun has been around for 20 years, training tirelessly day in and day out. Most of my favorite Web3 people have been around for a couple of years, going through the crypto cycles without flinching.

See, if you want to outperform most people, you really need only two things:

1. Repeat the boring fundamentals

2. And let everyone else drown in tactics

No matter the game you're playing—be it the game of crypto, the art of community building, or the craft of writing—you have to do the obvious and boring things you have complete control over.

The obvious path to 5,000 followers on Twitter is to write better threads.

The obvious path to 10,000 Substack subscribers is to publish more often.

The obvious path to onboard 100M users in crypto is to build better products.

Sure, the mundane tackling it takes to build something in Web3 sucks. It's boring, there's marginal reward (especially during this bear market), and more often than not, requires a substantial amount of grit. But you have to do the work because it's the only thing you can control.

It’s easy to forget how many people are struggling despite how hard they work, easy to forget that many, among us, have lost thousands in crypto, or published tweets that went unseen.

But it's all part of the game, to make it appear effortless, even when the reality is quite different.

Crypto twitter is definitely not real life.

It’s a giant competition where you can’t appear as if you're trying too hard at anything. In this competition, the illusions of effortlessness may tempt you, but it's in the sweat, the dedication, and the persistence that true victory lies.

There has never been a better time to keep doing the obvious things that nobody else does because this is your way to gain an edge during the next bull market.

- Eliot

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