How to get better and better

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The next 100 million crypto investors.

Health, Wealth, and Happiness

August 12, 2022

"You must learn a new way to think before you can master a new way to be."

- Marianne Williamson

New Investor Scorecard: Tether (USDT)

As the first successful stablecoin, Tether (USDT) has enjoyed a long run of global dominance until it started to falter this year:

Can investors continue to trust Tether?

In our new Blockchain Investor Scorecard, our analysts put Tether through our rigorous, peer-reviewed evaluation process to give it a star rating. Premium members can download the complete scorecard here:

Premium members can also compare our USDT rating to other stablecoins like USDC (similar market cap, big difference in ratings).

Not yet a Premium member? Click here to sign up and get access to all our investor scorecards today.

Must Read

Today’s most important story for crypto investors.

How to Win The Merge (Bankless): The great upgrade to Ethereum, aka The Merge, now has a scheduled date: Sep 15 or 16.

This article covers many of the tactics we've unpacked in previous newsletters on how investors can take advantage of this massive opportunity.

Investor takeaways:

1) The simplest strategy is just to buy and hold ETH now before The Merge. Not only is the price likely to go up in the short term, but it may become deflationary long term (your investment will be worth more of the pie).

2) Buying ETH now, as we discussed on Wednesday, may also get you a potential airdrop of any Ethereum forks that get spun off by miners desperate to retain PoW (free money since you'll likely sell those tokens immediately).

3) As Ethereum shifts to proof of stake, you can also buy tokens of the staking companies most likely to benefit (we've only recommended the leader LDO, not the others mentioned in this article which are still small and hard to use.)

4) Finally, you can bet on Layer 2 solutions like Polygon and Arbitrum, though we have not recommended any of these yet as the L2 market is still very young.

We're one month away, folks. Now's the chance!

How to Get Better and Better

by John Hargrave

A hundred years ago, Émile Coué changed the way people think.

He was an international sensation in America, England, and his native France. People lined up around the block to get into his lecture tours. His book smashed the bestseller charts.

That book, Self-Mastery Through Conscious Auto Suggestion, taught a method for people to cure themselves of any disease, rid themselves of any habit, and accomplish any goal within reason.

The testimonials poured in from around the world. Coué’s method had cured people of everything from insomnia to rheumatism to asthma. His audiences were moved to tears with joy and gratitude. He was the faith healer of his day.

However, he would remind his followers that you are the one doing the healing by following this simple method.

I’ll get to his method in a moment because we can apply it to investing as well as everything else, but here’s the TLDR summary: every day when you wake up and just before going to sleep, you repeat this phrase 20 times:

Every day in every way, I am getting better and better.

The Coué Technique

Coué started his career in France as a pharmacist. He quickly discovered what medical science today calls the placebo effect.

If he gave a prescription to a patient and raved about the excellent results it had obtained for other patients, they would frequently find the drug worked better.

Today, pharmaceutical companies spend millions of dollars developing drugs that can beat the placebo effect. They’ll give one set of patients the drug and another set of patients a sugar pill. The new drug has to beat people curing themselves with their own mind.

Coué believed we have not one mind, but two minds, which we call “will” and “imagination.” Although we believe we are masters of our will, we are actually mastered by our imagination.

Imagine you have a long plank of wood, one foot wide and thirty feet long. Coué asks you to walk across it: no problem.

Now imagine the same plank of wood is strung between the towers of a mighty cathedral and you must once again walk across it.

The walking (i.e., the willing) is the same, but now the imagination pictures the terror of falling to your certain death, and the act of walking becomes impossible.

Coué’s method was to demonstrate to his patients that the imagination controlled everything. Here’s a simple experiment you can try for yourself. For ten seconds, clasp your hands and squeeze them together so tightly that you can no longer pull them apart.

It’s an interesting exercise because your mind is saying, “Of course, I know I can pull them apart,” but as long as you’re doing the exercise correctly, you can’t pull them apart.

Coué would use this technique, plus many others like it, to put his patients in a state of suggestion (today, we’d call it hypnosis), then tell them that their ailment, habit, or life goal was no different than that hand-clasping exercise.

This applies to investors, whether you're just starting out or you're managing multimillion-dollar portfolios.

If you're convinced that investing is difficult and complex, it will be. If you flood your imagination with the idea that it's easy and fun, that will happen as well.

The key, of course, is repetition. 20 times in the morning and 20 times before bed, you repeat your imaginative statement.

“My body is healthy and beautiful.”

“Every day, I am growing more financially prosperous.”

“I am surrounded by loving and satisfying relationships.”

For a generation that had just lived through the horrors of World War I, Coué’s philosophy was a healing balm. Like today, there was a general mood of hopeless nihilism about the world. Coué offered a positive, hopeful outlook that we could generate within ourselves.

After years of seeing everything getting worse and worse, it was a relief for people to believe things were getting better and better.

“Every day in every way, I am getting better and better.”

Émile Coué's Monument in Park Sainte-Marie, Nancy, France

The Investor Takeaway

Most investors are slaves to their imaginations.

When the market is going up, they imagine getting rich quick. FOMO floods their brain, and they jump in, fearful of missing the opportunity.

When the market is going down, FOMO turns to FUD, and they fear losing it all. They obsessively check prices then sell their holdings, usually at a loss.

Coué believed the will is always a slave to the imagination. This is a universal law. No matter how strong-willed most investors think they are, they're actually ruled by their imaginations.

The good news is the imagination can be trained.

Coué’s method (repeating your statement 20 times in the morning and 20 times before bed) is a good one (there is research showing that writing it down each day can be even more powerful).

The trick is to find the belief holding you back. In modern terms, we might call this “hacking your constraint program.” Often, the belief is tucked away so deeply, we may not even be consciously aware of it.

What are your imagination limitations?

“Everything I do ends in failure.”

“I’m too old/dumb/unfocused.”

“My ADHD makes me unable to follow through.”

“People like me aren’t good with money.”

“I don’t have enough capital to do what I want.”

Our imagination can be our worst enemy, but as Coué would say, it could also be our best friend. We can easily turn these statements around like so:

“Each day I am growing more financially prosperous.”

“I absorb new information quickly and easily.”

“My mind is quick, agile, and able to see in HD.”

“Everything I do creates value.”

“My body’s filled with health. My life is filled with wealth.”

Plenty of self-help literature implies this is all you have to do. Just hack your brain with these sayings and the money will come rolling in. Of course, you then have to actually do the work.

But the work (i.e., the will) is subject to the imagination. Put another way, the imagination is the cause, and the work is the effect. Change your imagination, and you'll change the direction and the results of your work.

According to Coué, your imagination (your self-created beliefs) can be self-adjusted.

Every day in every way, you can grow better and better.

The more you repeat it, the more you believe it.

The more you believe it, the more you will see it.

Health, wealth, and happiness,

John Hargrave

Publisher

Bitcoin Market Journal

ICYMI