The most expensive story I've ever written

Last month, I lost a $15k crypto investment because I made a mistake when writing down my 24-word password.

Cryptocurrency stored in a cold wallet is decentralized, so there's no one to call for help if things go wrong.

I was in shock. I've always been overly safe with storing passwords so I couldn't believe I had made such a stupid mistake. I was in denial so I spent my whole day trying to get in.

I got angry with myself and the world. I had been waiting 2 years to take it out and invest it in my projects and maybe a down payment for a home, and now I couldn't even access it.

"Why me?" I kept thinking. "Why now?"

During that same week I lost quite a bit of motivation to keep doing my best because I felt like the world hadn't rewarded me accordingly. I kept whining and playing the victim.

Thankfully I soon realized this was the perfect chance to apply some of the philosophy I had been reading and talking about, so I opened a classic book on Stoicism.

I flicked to a random page and "Negative Visualization" came up.

"The dark sibling of positive visualization"

That chapter instructed me to close my eyes, think about my current problem or frustration, then zoom out and come up with 1 to 10 other issues that would have been much, much worse and sit on those for a good 5 minutes.

All of a sudden, everything fell into place.

What just felt like a big problem now felt like a solvable first-world problem.

Is $15k a lot of money? Definitely! For most people, including myself, It's not just pocket change, and it's very healthy to accept the negative feelings that come with losing such a sum.

But sometimes, choosing to believe a useful, not necessarily true, story can help us move forward much quicker, and I chose to believe that it wasn't that much money. That helped me.

I was now realizing how incredibly lucky I was to be in good health, with time on my hands, and a fulfilling purpose.

After all, I lived in a nice city, with a supportive network of people, doing fulfilling work, eating nutritious food, and drinking clean water.

My situation wasn't as bad as I was making it out to be.

I could've lost access to a $150k investment, or even a $1.5m one!

I could've gotten a $15k monthly recurring health bill due to a tragic accident.

My home could have been burned down. This happened to my neighbours two years ago.

I had no time to cry and complain about losing my investment when I was in such a privileged position; I had too many amazing opportunities to get back on track.

After applying negative visualization I chose to see the incident as a lesson that would save me much bigger pain in the future.

The thing is that If you keep visualizing a brighter present and future, you'll always feel like your actual *real* present is not bright enough.

A bright color will look dark next to a brighter color, and vice-versa.

These two circles below are the exact same color, but they look very different due to their background.

Context and perspective are everything in life!

Negative visualization may be painful and depressing at first, but by the time you finish, your initial problem will seem much less daunting to tackle.

In some cases, you'll feel like the luckiest person alive!

As the popular proverb goes:

"If we all threw our problems in a pile and saw everyone else's, we'd grab ours back."

Much love and respect,

Ash Lamb