In 2020, I paid $500 for a crypto newsletter subscription. At the time it felt ridiculous. I was working toward my Series 7 and Series 66 licenses, building a career in financial services — and here I was, paying for trading signals from someone on the internet.
I invested $2,000 following the recommendations.
That $2,000 became $50,000.
I was stunned. Not just by the money — but by how easy it was. I had clicked a few buttons. That was it. And something about how easy it was scared me more than any loss ever could. I thought: what am I doing building a career in an office when this is available to anyone?
Then I made the mistake that changed everything. I stopped following guidance and decided I could do it alone.
I went deep — YouTube videos, whitepapers, on-chain analysis, macro theory. My wife told me I was obsessed. She was right. I started seeing the bigger picture: the institutional moves, the geopolitical games, the way only nation-states could move markets the way they were moving. I was beginning to understand something real.
Then I found an exchange that offered discounted fees if you held their token. I put $4,000 in — not even as a trade, just for the fee discount. Staked it and forgot about it.
I woke up one morning and that $4,000 had become $18,000 overnight.
My daughter Karuna had just been born. I rented a mansion in Las Vegas and celebrated with family. Life felt like it was finally opening up.
Then the market crashed.
And I could not look at the screen.
Not wouldn't. Could not. Something in me went completely offline. I watched a trillion dollars leave the market in weeks and I was psychologically frozen. I understood the mechanics. I had the analysis. I had done the research. And I still could not act — could not even face the numbers.
I took a medical leave from work. I packed everything that fit in my car. I drove to Utah to see my father. Then to Arkansas. We did Airbnbs, living off the last of the crypto gains, burning through money while I tried to find some version of sanity.
Eventually we found a farm. We bought a trailer and lived there for two years.
That was when the real work started.
Not financial work. Psychological work.
I began studying why I had frozen. Why the win had scared me as much as the loss. Why, with every tool available, I still couldn't execute at the moments that mattered most. I went deep into self-image psychology — the kind of work most people avoid because it's slow, uncomfortable, and humbling. I discovered something that changed everything:
Your eyes are not cameras. They are projectors.
What you believe about yourself — your worthiness, your identity, your relationship to wealth — is what gets projected onto the external world. The market doesn't create your reality. It reflects it.
As within, so without.
I had been carrying unconscious beliefs I didn't even know existed. That wealth was dangerous. That wanting money badly was spiritually wrong. That people like me don't keep what they make. These weren't conscious thoughts — they lived underneath, directing my behavior while I called it bad timing or bad luck.
The market hadn't betrayed me. My own psychology had.
Today I live in Missouri. I work construction — building a nursing home, doing cabinet work with my hands. There is something deeply grounding about physical labor when you have spent years in abstract digital worlds. It brings you back to your body. Back to what is concrete and real.
I'm still in crypto. Still building. Still doing the inner work.
CryptoInstructions exists because I needed it to exist and it didn't. Because nobody was talking about the real reason investors fail — not strategy, not timing, not market conditions. The real reason is that most people's self-image cannot hold the wealth they are trying to create.
This project is my attempt to close that gap. For myself. And for anyone else who has ever understood exactly what to do — and still couldn't do it.