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Most people don’t even know what their values are. For them, life is one hell of a confusing trip. They are probably hovering in between “I want to be rich and famous because everyone on TV is rich and famous” and “shit, I am never going to be rich and famous!”, so they feel pain all of the time. This is called cognitive dissonance, a rupture between what you are and what you want to be, and you don’t know how to close the gap/probably do not even know that there is a gap and where the pain is coming from. You are just unhappy with everything, all the time. This is how the majority of people go through life, really, because their values are not something they carefully chose but were imposed upon them by society, their parents, the media, and so on. Their mental well-being will always be a playball of external factors like “how popular am I?” and thus, they are miserable if they can’t have that awesome pair of shoes or that awesome-looking watch those funky people with chiseled abs on TV are wearing. This may come as a surprise to you, but living with those values is a nightmare, even if most don’t realize it. Anyway, let’s assume you are self-reflected enough and have read enough books in your life to be able to choose your own values, that still doesn’t mean you won’t be confused as hell. When I was young I quickly realized there was an incredible shallowness to all the mainstream bling and was looking for something to do with my life far, far away from all the brainwashed zombies that were visiting my high school. I dived deep into several subcultures ranging from the Heavy Metal scene to philosophy to professional video gaming to martial arts to writing to drawing to self-taught web design, and ultimately, gambling. And 10 years later, I am still a gambler. I was looking for an independent lifestyle – location independent, people independent. See, being a gambler means a lot but it certainly does not mean being lazy. There are all these stories out there of prodigies like Stu Ungar, Bobby Fischer, Chip Reese, and so on. They went from $10 to $10.000.000 without ever studying the game. And if they ever went broke, they would end up ahead anyway because they borrowed money from another ridiculous gambler and then run their accounts back up and blow it all on hookers and cocaine and so on, rubbing the cash on their t… Awesome. You know, it might even be true that these people never had to work hard – they just had a natural gift. But they were also obsessed with what they were doing, they had ZERO conflicting values stopping them. I will get to this point in a bit. The other thing is that yes, of course, we only hear the stories of the prodigies because they are the stories that sell the tickets. No one wants to hear about a guy like me that worked hard for years, 18 hours straight every day until it finally paid off and I am now seeing the interest on my investments. That’s just boring. We want to hear the borderline rollercoaster stories, the top 1%. And then we think we have to be like that, too. I said this before, but when you look at the social media, that is the top 5% of people’s lives. The rest is as shitty and normal as yours. But you think their life is party hard all the time and then you freak out because yours is so standard.