tldr : around this time last year, i had $20 to my name, a macbook, and conviction that i'd succeed. i made $4k + in a span of 6 months at 19. i spent almost all my savings to get the mac. got my first opportunity in web3 as a product manager and earned back ~$1.2k within 3 months. then came crypto. i was obsessing over attention markets, defi, blockchain infra, and privacy tech. wrote down my thesis on zcash. even got my first internet validation when @naval liked a few of my thoughts. october arrived. the market nuked. i panic-sold everything and rotated almost my entire portfolio into zcash. 40 days later, it did a 5x. then i lost access to the wallet. back to effectively zero. all that remained was a small usdc balance and a 2-month runway. making money wasn't the hard part. keeping it was. so i went back to work. joined a solana-affiliated content agency. learned distribution. learned media. learned leverage.