The secret to getting rich in crypto without wasting your life
Most advice in crypto tells you to “stay in the trenches”.
But if the trenches cost you your time and your energy, are you really winning?
The real way to win is by finding actions that move you forward without consuming your entire life.
After hunting airdrops since 2023, I realised that I wasted the most precious resource when grinding out low-value tasks:
Factor time into your ROI
Many just look at the monetary gains to decide how good their return is.
But there’s one more factor that many fail to consider:
Time.
Spending time is more valuable than money because it’s something that we can never earn back.
You can’t make more of it.
You don’t know how much you have left.
Time is a finite asset that we own, so we have to optimise for it with every action.
Quoting from @SahilBloom:
The time associated with an investment is just as important as the money. When you make an investment, you’re putting both your money and your time into it as an input. There are some investments that require money and no time (index funds) and some that require money and a lot of time (active multi-family real estate). Make sure you consider both money and time inputs when evaluating the return profile.
That’s why I believe that real estate (and even perp DEX farming) gives a poor ROI on time, even if they give good rewards:
These require a lot of management, so the time cost is high (even if the gross profit is high too).
If you make a few thousand, but spend weeks looking at the charts, is it worth it?
The real flex right now is to make 3-4 figures while working 4 hours (or less) a day.
Or earning more while doing less.
Because anyone can make money with this:
Everyone can be successful if they have unlimited time
Whenever I share my progress on certain airdrops, I get comments like “you’re not grinding hard enough”.
Which is absolutely the truth.
I choose not to spend 24/7 on airdrops, because I know I will burn out.
I’ve already experienced that a couple of times.
If we had unlimited time, we could expose ourselves to every single airdrop and qualify for them.
We can spin up multiple wallets and get maximum allocations for each one.
But we don’t.
Everyone has a different amount of these finite resources:
Capital and time.
If we have capital, we need less time to get rich.
If we have no capital, then we can compensate for it by spending more time.
But time is not always equally spent:
Grinding mindlessly is not a flex
The typical advice that most airdrop accounts give:
Grind tasks if you’re time-rich but capital-poor.
“These tasks only take 5-10 minutes a day, so if you’re not getting airdrops, it’s on you”.
But they all add up, and it becomes a huge time sucker.
Especially when doing it across multiple wallets if they are the same boring, repetitive tasks.
I was stuck in this grinding trap too back in 2023 and 2024.
I had a bookmark folder of all the daily tasks that I’ll do (even claiming faucet tokens).
But I’ve learnt this lesson:
There are both high and low ROI tasks we can do with our time.
Grinding is not a flex, because it turns airdrops into another job (but without any guarantees).
We have no clear indication of how much we can earn.
And if we’re grinding out low-value tasks that anyone can replicate, there’s no way we can stand out from Sybils.
Airdrop farming has become overly diluted, and the amount of time we spend is not a good indicator of how much we’ll receive.
The type of tasks and value we provide is more important.
And this is the ideal way to get airdrops now:
The best returns come from low-time but high-value actions
‘Set and forget’ airdrops are the best opportunity we could be exposed to.
This usually involves having a large amount of liquidity, and we deposit funds into projects that reward us for it.
But that’s not possible for most of us with limited capital.
So the alternative is contributing meaningfully to the project in a way that most can’t do.
Which we can guess based on the project’s incentive structure, but we’ll never know until the official announcement.
This way, we can truly stand out from all the Sybils and bots while getting recognised by these projects.
To be truly successful in airdrops, this becomes the greatest skill to own:
Judgment becomes the key
There are so many opportunities for airdrops in this current age.
Multiple protocols keep launching tokens
So we have to filter out the best opportunities that suit our unique circumstances (here’s mine):
Freedom as my ultimate goal
Limited time outside of work
Decent capital to play with per project (max $1k)
I’m doing this by finding projects that I truly enjoy using, and sharing my experiences online.
It’s a bonus if they don’t have any InfoFi campaigns, so there’s lower competition for the allocations.
None of us has the same amount of time to commit to crypto and airdrops, so we need to play smart.
We’re taught to be terminally online and grind constantly to think we are successful in crypto.
But how is this sustainable? How long before we burn out?
Money can be earned back, but time can’t.
So with every action, optimise for time.
Find ways to do high-impact actions with the limited time that you have (which sometimes, is doing nothing).
Sharing what you did onchain is the highest time ROI play because it compounds your reputation while you continue exploring new protocols onchain.
I shared more about how I’m doing this here.
If you are tired of mindless grinding for airdrops, build a reputation that compounds (instead of burning out), and let rewards come to you automatically just by being yourself: