"Be Water, My Friend.
Empty your mind.
Be formless, shapeless, like water.
You put water into a cup, it becomes the cup.
You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle.
You put it into a teapot, it becomes the teapot.
Now water can flow or it can crash.
Be water, my friend."- Bruce Lee
When Bruce Lee says to be "formless", he means that people shouldn't allow themselves to be trapped in a certain mindset. Instead, a person should be able to adapt to certain situations, grow, and change; that's how one can adopt the qualities of water.
One of the most important characteristics of water is its fluidity. When you spill the water, it will not wait to see what’s ahead. It just moves on filling every crack and spreading all over. Water is not afraid to explore until it finds its way.
Another great property of water is that it adapts to its environment. It is formless and shapeless. You put water into a cup, it adapts to the shape of the cup. You put it into a bottle, it adapts to the bottle.
In life, most people act rigidly. They don’t want to change. They live within a system where they don’t want to change.
Being like water means you never stay in a fixed position. You change with the change. You constantly improve yourself based on the situation you face.
“But Heart, what’s your point? Isn’t this a crypto substack? How do I make money from this?”
My point is, you need to let go of this:
The first quarter of 2022 has seen a big drop in crypto prices across the board, BTC and ETH lost significantly but some alts got totally rekt, -70% to -90% in some cases.
As the market did its thing, and BTC and ETH charts painted different highs and lows, people started taking sides as usual, posting bull or bear memes, charts, posts, youtube video, “bear until X price” posts, you know the drill.
This is completely detrimental to your success as a trader/shitcoiner/investor, if you get caught in this vortex, or worse if you start fixating on a position (I’m bull 4eva! or “lmao mumus days are numbered! bear time”), you deny yourself two important things:
the ability to spot change and react accordingly and FAST. If you see BTC going from 37k to 48k and you’re still “a bear”, because you don’t want to lose face after being publicly bear for so long now, you miss the entire pump being sidelined or worse rekt in shorts.
the ability to spot opportunities to make gains even in a “shit market”. This Q1 saw launches of tokens like $STG that went 5x the launch price on immense liquidity, but if you were risk averse this entire time you may have missed it or play it bad. Not to mention tons of memecoins doing multiple x.
This is doubly true if you somehow declare your position in a public place, like twitter, because you cement your bias and then it’s harder to shake it off.
“Be like water” is also related to conviction and time/opportunity. A short anecdote:
Heart had around $100k of $CVX on January, when price was around $40. This $CVX was stacked on the platform. A bug was found and CVX had to unstake and redeploy their contracts, thus “freeing” millions of dollars of staked CVX. Price went below $20 in a panic sell by the time Heart heard about it and was able to act. Now, Heart had two options:
hold the CVX and hope it would return with time back to $40
Sell the CVX and try to make it back on the market
Heart sold, and took the 50k. After a few weeks, the $COW airdrop came, Heart put all the 50k into it around 1.30$, sold for 70k around $2, put those 70k towards $STG and more or less doubled them.
At the time of writing, $CVX managed to recover back to $38 which is great, but took many highly bullish scenarios to come true for it to happen, and it’s still not completely back to January prices. Truly, it could have never recovered and made Heart a bagholder.
Meanwhile, Heart was like water, and now is sitting on a larger pot of $.
Be like water.
Really loved this post!