Getting It Out The Mud

Money doesn’t come first. It never did. It’s just that some people still think it does. They wake up, they chase, they strategize, they plan, as if there’s some universal formula. As if the way I make money can be mapped onto you, as if the artist and the businessman and the drug dealer and the coder and the hedge fund guy are playing the same game. They aren’t and they never were.

You can only make money one way. Your way.

It’s the same way you move through life, the same way you think, the same way you breathe. It’s the rhythm of how you make decisions, what you notice, what you ignore. Some people are wired for structure, for systems, for making money the clean way, the predictable way, the "safe" way. Others aren’t. Some people need the chaos, the chase, the unpredictability, the thrill of knowing everything could fall apart at any second. Some people need to create. Some people need to take. Some people need to build something from nothing, and some people need to manipulate the things that already exist.

The way you make money is the most hyper-personalized aspect of your entire being.

It isn’t separate from the way you live. That’s where people go wrong. They think they can do one thing now, suffer through it, tolerate it, and then somehow later they’ll transition into the life they actually want. That’s not how it works. The lifestyle comes first. It always does. Because if you’re not built for the office, you will never thrive in it. If you’re not built for the street, you will never get it out the mud. If you’re not built for risk, you will always hesitate when it matters most.

A drug dealer can’t make money like a CEO. A CEO can’t make money like a freelancer. The self employed can’t make money like the nine-to-fives. These aren’t just different methods of making money. They’re different realities. Different personalities. Different ways of moving through the world. You can’t swap one for another. You can’t take someone out of their natural environment, drop them somewhere else, and expect them to succeed because they won’t.

Some people need hierarchy. They need to climb something, to follow rules, to work their way up. They’re the ones who thrive in corporate environments, in bureaucracies, in organizations where status is earned in increments. Others can’t even function in that world. It suffocates them. They don’t climb; they build. They don’t wait for promotions; they create something from scratch. And then there are those who move sideways, slipping through gaps, finding ways to profit from the inefficiencies in the system rather than trying to work within it.

It’s not just about skill. It’s not about knowledge. It’s about what feels natural. What feels effortless. Not effortless in the sense that it’s easy, but effortless in the sense that it’s aligned. That it makes sense to you. Because if you’re wired a certain way, there are things you can do without hesitation that other people couldn’t even begin to understand. And if you’re trying to force yourself to operate like someone you’re not, it will never work.

Most people never figure this out. They keep trying to fit themselves into the wrong structures, trying to adopt strategies that were never meant for them. They see someone else making money and think, I should do that too. But it doesn’t work like that. It never did. Because it was never about the strategy.

If sitting in front of a screen all day makes you miserable, then being a crypto trading millionaire was never in the cards for you.

So the real question isn’t how do I make money? The real question is what kind of life do I want to live? Because that life already has a way to make money built into it. You just have to see it.

And the moment you understand that, the moment you stop trying to chase money the way someone else told you to, the moment you stop thinking of money as something separate from your life and instead something that emerges from your life, everything changes.

Live the life first. The money shows up when it’s supposed to.

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