Jordyn Woods surprised Karl-Anthony Towns with an extra-special car for his 30th birthday ❤️
“During the summer Karl asked me if I could drive any car for a day which one would it be.. I answered and his response was ‘l wouldn't pick anything crazy, I just really loved my mom's car she had when I was a kid.’ So I went on a mission these past months to find the car, shipped it across the country, got it fixed up and was able to surprise him with it today for his 30th!”
(via jordynwoods/IG)
Honestly felt I was delusional for most of my life.
Always had big dreams, played them off like they were easy to achieve- yet had nothing to show for it.
Years go by. Nothing.
‘Will I really live and die without leaving my mark?’
I honestly think that the first part of life is the test.
The test of resilience. The proof to the universe that you truly want it.
Once you fight the self sabotage in your mind and start to build real value for real people, the egg starts to crack.
It’ll be a tiny crack at first, but that’s all you need to prove that ‘I can do it too.’
At least that’s how it went from me.
9 months later, everything I had dreamed of 3 years prior seems to have paid off.
It all starts and ends in the mind.
I am no better than you. You are simply as good as you believe you are.
You just need to go prove it.
So go prove it.
Alex Slater
The only regret you're going to have is that you didn't do more. You didn't love hard enough. You didn't try hard enough. You didn't go hard enough. You didn't capture every moment and memory so viscerally that it becomes branded like a scorching burn in your mind forever.
OBSESSION BEATS DISCIPLINE EVERY TIME.
AND I'VE LOST MY OBSESSION...
It's time for me to be honest with myself and with all of you:
I'm putting Nano Flips on maintenance mode.
For those who don't know, Nano Flips is my newsletter and consulting business helping people to buy, improve, and sell small internet businesses.
What I call the "gentler path" to entrepreneurship.
The business managed to get to seven figures in revenue, pretty much by accident. And it was fun for a while. Very fun.
But..For the past couple years, I've felt tortured. Lost. I've built a cage for myself. Not aligned.
Throughout my career, I've done everything.
Affiliate marketing, nightclub promotion, strategy for top four consulting firms, mentoring at world's top accelerators, building financial media platforms, running ecom brands, launched an SVOD... EVERYTHING.
Somehow, I've managed to make some decent wins despite having way more failures than successes.
The turning point in my journey?
I had a life changing exit right as COVID started. My partner, investors, and I made just over $30M.
Much of that was in public company stock. Run by people that didnt know what they were doing sadly.
I watched a massive amounts of my net worth - millions of dollars - evaporate into thin air while locked up and unable to do anything/sell.
Luckily, I managed to pull some out and keep it. It created a nice nest egg for my future.
Heart-wrenching? Absolutely. But I've come to see it as a rite of passage.
Everyone I know who's truly wealthy has made millions and lost millions. It's okay. I'll make it all over again.
That win changed my life - people believed in me. I could make bigger swings.
During COVID, by chance, I started this newsletter about buying and selling little internet businesses. I had done it, and was just writing about what I was looking at buying originally, Nano Flips became a labor of love.
It grew into a business. I sold cohorts, consulting, info products. Helped hundreds buy their first businesses.
Then I bought a hearing aid brand, grew it to $3M a year, sold it to OpenStore. I also flipped a small dog frisbee, a and bought and grew soccer blog and small saas in that time.
The small things didn't excite me though.
For the past two years, I've felt lost. I don't love it anymore.
@naval talked about this with @ChrisWillx recently on his pod. I've created a content cage for myself. I have to keep producing content around a version of me I no longer feel aligned with.
At almost 37, I'm halfway through my working life. And I've learned what I need:
1. Partners I love working with (I'm tired of sitting alone in my LA office every day)
2. Work that feels like play
3. Seeing tangible results from my efforts
4. Being enabled by the future, not disabled by it
I've been both wealthy and miserable (millions in my accounts, tears rolling down my cheeks, feeling no goal, no purpose, completely lost)...
And I've been broke but fulfilled ( $13 in my checking account, living in an ex-girlfriend's apartment because I couldn't afford rent, building a business I deeply believed in, chasing a goal I was certain of).
My purpose comes from the hunt - from chasing a goal. Without that, I feel purposeless.
This isn't to say I don't still believe in entrepreneurship through acquisition. Buying small internet businesses remains an incredible way for someone to step into entrepreneurship without losing their shirt while figuring out what's right for them.
I've been floundering with this decision for the past couple years, but it's clear to me now.
This is my declaration to the world, and myself.
So what's next?
I'll keep writing the Nano Flips newsletter, and it will continue on. We'll eventually find it a new home through an acquisition/exit.
Ill take it and offer subs to join my personal email list (you'll have the option to opt out).
I'm doing interim CMO work for a company I really love and believe in.
I'll still do advisory work for people acquiring businesses or investing every now and then until my next big thing hits. I still love it sometimes and I'm good at it - it just doesn't fit my overall thesis of what really lights me up.
I might raise a fund for much larger acquisitions.
In the background, I'm playing with something at the intersection of media, AI, and narrative content. It makes me no money yet, but it's more fun than anything I've worked on in years.
I'm not leaving Twitter - just changing my bio and pinned tweet. Taking a mental step down from the version of me that only talks about buying and selling small internet businesses.
I've spent too long "sitting at the bottom of the tree trying to become Buddha" - meditating my way to my ikigai.
But the truth is: entropy introduces you to the perfect partner or opportunity when you're in motion.
So I'm going to keep running around, trying things, taking swings.
This isn't just my declaration to the world - it's a call to action for all of you:
Chase obsessions
Pursue what makes you feel fulfilled.
Time is fleeting.
Life is too short to build businesses you don't love or create content that doesn't light you up inside.
To all of you, thank you seems inadequate. This community has been EVERYTHING.
I've made some of my best friends here and made millions of dollars from Twitter in the past couple years. You've changed my life drastically through your follows, engagement, and support on this journey.
I can't wait to start the next chapter and share it all with you when it happens. Not sure when that will be, but we'll find out together.
Reach out if I can help any of you.
Cheers to new beginnings.
Mfers. I survived Luna and FTX. The NFT crash. Blockfi.
You can’t even handle your fart bukkake gamble coin being down for a month.
Put tampons in the men’s bathroom at all crypto events going forward cuz this space is infested with pussies now.
Dude starts business. Bussiness starts doing well
Dude gets girl. Starts getting alpha’d by girl taking to dinner 5 times a week etc.
Girl starts hovering texting all day & pesting
Dude stops focusing on business cater to women
Dude starts treating employees like shit to compensate for women owning him
Business fails
Girl leaves
Seen it 100 times
Sunday story about risk management🫡
My first monster trade in crypto was Luna. I was essentially all-in at about $0.25 in late-2020. Even before the Binance listing. I rolled in all my DeFi summer profits into it.
And I staked it, despite the standard Cosmos 28 day lock. Staking rewards were low vs the rest of DeFi at around 5%. But these were paid in Luna so it turned out to be exponential growth as Luna mooned.
When you’re staking, sometimes there’s a pleasant surprise. One day a validator fat fingered and stakers got a massive reward. At the time was like 50k tokens in a day for me. They weren’t able to claw it back. Big W.
In early 2021 while Luna broke $1 and I was up big, I started getting uneasy about the ponzi math. I always knew it was a little sus but to me it seemed like a massive affiliate program more than anything. I could rationalize it as real good marketing.
I never imagined that the whole tie in to Chai was fake. But some Terra insiders started unexpectedly leaving. One sent me a rant saying that Do is up to no good. So I started the unstake process.
By the time I was able to unstake the price shot up to $8. So the unlock process really benefited me. Luna was ripping at that time. I cashed out, only to see it hit $20 just a few days later and then convincingly pass $100.
It was by far the most profitable trade of my life but the cope of missing out was so extreme. Didn’r want to die or anything but felt like an idiot (which is maybe worse).
Nevertheless, I parlayed those funny money gains into the novel new concept of jpegs, and made some early stage crypto venture investing bets. Both worked out magically.
But the moral of the story is two fold. Firstly, when you’re staking something (take Solana at 9% for instance), don’t consider just the number. Because the rewards are paid in the native token. So if you think the native token will rise over time, you’ll end up with exponential rewards like I did.
And also in my case I earned essentially tens of thousands of Luna by staking. Which wasn’t much at $0.25 - and it sat in that range for awhile. But it turned out to be worth tens of millions in rewards if you top ticked it not even very long after.
Secondly, don’t really kick yourself when you make money in crypto but miss out on more. Things swing visciously up and down. If I held a year longer my bag would be worth zero.
Especially when it was locked staking as everything collapsed in a matter of days for Luna when it did.. A win is a win is a win. It’s what you do with that win after that matters.
What I typically do is cycle stupid gains into much lower risk stuff, while keeping enough high risk capital available to make things interesting.
The lower risk stuff lets me be comfortable living and allows me to be able to take extraordinary risks with smaller amounts of capital.
I’m a rabid speculator at heart and will never stop gambling. But I can at least mitigate the loss to a point where it has no effect on my actual life. And also have the ability to still hit that 100x or even 1000x. You can’t replace that feeling with anything.
But the last thing you want to do is roundtrip your life. Risk management isn’t discussed enough around here. Going from rich to poor is a legit suicide scenario. Don’t be stupid. It’s fun to gamble and it can be profitable, but don’t bet your life on it.
I get that I’m older than most people on ct. Life comes at you fast. You’ll be my age in no time. If you’re here you got a pretty good shot at setting yourself up for life. But an equally good chance of just wasting the prime of your life.
Most people fold too quickly. Quit too quickly. I’ll go down to my last penny. To my last ounce of hope. I’ll pull myself out of any hole. That’s the difference. Learn to fight and you will become invincible
Who gives a FUCK who you were yesterday. Shit don’t matter. You can pick ur shit up and move states. Get a new job. Start a new biz. Get a new girl. People tell you to FIX your problems. Mf what if your problems aren’t ACTUALLY yours?? What if your problems are EXTERNAL? Run away from ‘your’ problems and all of a sudden everything is fixed..