I consider myself rich when I've payed my mortgage, can work with whatever I want (in the words of Steve Jobs, "follow your intuition"), have an economic buffer and can choose when, where and how I want to go on vacations.
How did my journey towards being rich start then? I suppose it started as I got divorced. For a looong time I had been trying to make a game engine with some shitty games on top. It's not possible for one person to compete against UnrealEngine, and it's not like I didn't know that; it's just that I didn't want to let go of my hopes of doing something I love instead of working at a boring place developing crap for someone who hardly cares. My main mistake was to think that I was so heavily invested in game engine development that I couldn't let it go. Like a gambler trying to win everything back on the next round. Now I find my self in a position where I can do what I love, but without pressure.
Anyway, when me and my ex split up, I guess I had some time to think. Suddenly the hurdles of everyday life became smaller and I was able to get a slightly better "outside" perspective of my life. So five months after the divorce, as I released Trabant 1.1, I came to the conclusion that I should try to get earn my dough some sensible way. I don't remember why I settled on finance, since I find it super-dull and offensively unproductive for society, but finance it was. From March until I resigned in December I tried three different trading assets: leverage instruments (i.e. margin trading of stocks, which pretty much means that when a stock goes up, the leverage goes up by a factor X, when the stock goes down, the leverage goes down with factor X), stock and finally cryptocurrencies.
Those trading assets are pretty much the same thing though. You let the computer sit and buy and sell through a broker. But one one small, but highly important, difference between stock trading and trading cryptocurrencies is that the latter incurs almost no fees. That means that you can sell BitCoin when it has gone up by 1%, and that's pretty much what you'll earn.
My pigheadedness, and industriousness got me a long way towards getting rich. For instance I was close to giving up before attempting to trade in cryptocurrencies as a last attempt. I'm also fairly intelligent, which correlates with success, so that helped too (far from genius level though). You don't need to be smart to make it, but if you're not you'd be wise to follow in the footsteps of someone who is. Another important factor is my intentional focus on a richer future; this I can really recommend, no matter if you believe in Jungian synchronicity, psychic functioning or just yourself, as it allows you to home in on your target.
Another important factor is that I'm fairly agreeable, which has a negative correlation with most career paths. If I'd be more of a bully and lower in agreeableness I'd probably be some boring manager somewhere thinking that my life was great, and I would have never come up with this idea.
One realization I've gotten - now that I'm earning my income in a way which should probably be prohibited as society has very little to gain from speculation - is that I have a lot of time on my hands. So soon I'll start working on some ideas on how to improve society. Sort of like charity but with time instead of money. (Actually I'll donate 10% of my profits to charity too, but that's beside the point.) I'm very much looking forward to it all!
My next post will be a post-mortem btw.
