A few years ago, a veteran in traditional finance told me that the first pot of gold in life requires leverage. If you can maintain an annual compound interest of over 10% afterward, you’ll have nothing to worry about for life.

Unfortunately, I didn’t understand the deeper meaning at the time, but now, looking back, I realize I am now part of the story.
I didn’t expect that my previous article on “Low Leverage Harms People” would gain good traffic and resonate deeply with many fellow “gamblers,” which is why I decided to continue writing the “Gambling Sobriety” series.
Why did we come to the crypto world?
Admittedly, some curiosity about new forms of assets and a desire to explore new business models play a role, but undeniably, we all want to make money faster. So when many comment to me, “Stay away from leverage,” I also find it unrealistic.
Because when we come here, we are already “leveraging” our lives.
But you can’t keep adding leverage forever.
The Way of Leverage
When you have almost no principal, being conservative is obviously useless; your only advantage is volatility.
Like many teams at Odaily and in the crypto space, our average age isn’t high—many are post-2000s. Most don’t come from wealthy backgrounds. When they enter the crypto industry, it’s clear they’re not here for “asset allocation.” What attracts them is this high-volatility, high-uncertainty, high-stakes environment.
They enter the same river at different times, with perceptions of the crypto world completely different from mine. Most of the time, I feel I can’t teach them much; instead, I glimpse new developments through them.
Although hot topics constantly change, the stories we experience always rhyme. We keep jumping between getting rich quickly and hitting zero, unable to control ourselves amid the digital fluctuations on the screen.
For example, my colleague Xiao N, an “A5 to A7 expert.”
In October 2021, right after graduation, during the peak of Axie Infinity’s hype, he decisively went all-in. Two months later, his funds jumped from A5 to A7 rapidly. But this was still a typical Ponzi scheme; after the peak, it naturally collapsed. He then chose to go all-in on another blockchain game, CryptoMines (Spaceship), and continued adding to his position after losses, trying to reach the peak again, nearly wiping out his funds.
In 2023, he early participated in inscriptions and caught the main rise of ORDI. Later, he followed the hype of Bome, Slerf, and other Solana memes, again from A5 to A7. At that time, SOL’s price soared past $200. He used 4x leverage to go long on Solana with full position, only to be wiped out again.
By 2025, he jumped on the bandwagon in the BSC meme market, tirelessly sitting through the chaos, again from A5 to A7. This time, he chose to heavily invest in BNBHolder when its market cap was about $170 million, only to see his position completely evaporate later.
These stories are not only entirely true but are even simplified versions of his wild swings—his actual cases of crazy fluctuations are countless...
Actually, my colleague Xiao N is very capable. He always manages to grasp the pulse of front-line hot topics and decisively jumps in. However, in the end, he doesn’t have much money left in his pocket.
If you only look at the assets and sectors, his trading trajectory seems chaotic. But if you strip away project names and market cycles, his behavioral logic is highly consistent: always going all-in, always wanting to earn more, repeatedly using the same gambling-like risk structure to fight the same anxiety: hoping to push life to the finish line with one big move.
This is called: wrongly continuously adding leverage to life, living a Sisyphus life.
The Battle with Your Brain
Many people have asked me why xx OGs and big players, who are already so wealthy, keep opening high-leverage contracts and repeatedly hitting zero. Can’t they do something else? Are they hedging? Are they laundering money?
Maybe some are, but certainly not all. Many of their opening logic and patterns clearly do not conform to hedging strategies.
In fact, we’re tired of these stories in the crypto space too. When whales fall, it’s like fireworks exploding in the sky. Many people risk losing “the money they truly need” to chase returns they don’t really need.
Because on the leverage road, many have gone from using leverage as an efficiency tool to being controlled by leverage. In reality, they no longer need a single correct judgment to change their fate or maximize gains. What they need is to control risk and avoid going to zero when they make mistakes.
But that’s very hard because we are already controlled by our own brains.
Human behavior is often governed by stable and stubborn patterns. Once these patterns form, they are very hard to change.
When someone faces something new for the first time, their brain mainly uses the “prefrontal cortex,” a recently popular term.
You’ll think about whether to do it, how to do it, whether it will cause problems—all judgment, impulse control, and planning are handled by the prefrontal cortex. But the prefrontal cortex has a very real flaw: it’s slow and energy-consuming. For the brain, every serious thought is a significant “energy expenditure.”
So, in principle, as long as a task is repeated enough times, the brain will automatically do one thing: hand over control from the prefrontal cortex to the habitual and procedural circuits. This process is like compressing a real-time calculation into a one-click shortcut.
This is very intuitive in experiments with mice. When a mouse is first placed in a Skinner box, whether it presses the lever is a decision that requires trial and error. It hesitates, observes the results, then decides whether to repeat the action.
But after experiencing “pressing the lever yields food” multiple times, it changes. It no longer judges whether it’s worth pressing; as soon as it sees the lever and enters the environment, its body automatically presses it. This behavior no longer involves the decision-making of the prefrontal cortex but is ingrained into a “context-response” automatic pathway.
Once inertia develops, the cognitive process originally used for judgment and adjustment is bypassed by the brain to save energy. You are controlled by this inertia.
After reading my article the day before yesterday, BITWU’s boss also wrote an article sharing his real experience: a traditional boss who, during market highs, used leverage trading, peaked with 370 Bitcoin, but after losses, without increasing leverage, repeatedly deposited funds—tens of thousands of RMB daily—reaching zero and then re-depositing, cycling for months until he went bankrupt and even accumulated debt.
I believe many people have had similar experiences. Deep down, they already know they’re “hooked,” but they can’t stop opening positions or going all-in.
Regain Your Prefrontal Cortex and Stop Leveraging
So, if you haven’t yet fallen into a vicious cycle, stop immediately!
If you’re already drifting further down the gambling road, what you need to do is not find a better target but start the difficult process of reclaiming control from your brain’s automatic reactions.
You need to reconstruct one thing: the correct “psychological reward” gained from trading. Many people keep going all-in, but it’s no longer about making money itself. The profit and loss on the books are just numbers. What truly drives you is the thrill, the sense of control, and the illusion of “retiring with this one shot.” If you still see fast, aggressive, heavy positions as the only commendable behavior, your brain will keep reinforcing this gambling loop.
You need to shift the reward focus from “how much I earned” to “whether I followed the rules,” whether you cut losses as planned, whether you reduced positions after profits, and whether you forced yourself to rest after a series of mistakes.
Only when you start to get positive feedback from “not getting hooked today” and “not breaking discipline today” will your brain gradually learn: the new source of security is not leverage but control, establishing a new pattern.
Another crucial point, which is easier to implement, is to be willing to spend money in the real world! Be willing to turn paper profits into real life. Cash out timely and enjoy a good life.
Remember, 1 SOL can already satisfy your appetite. If you want to buy a car, just go buy it—don’t always think “earn more to buy another car.” Rebuild your brain’s human circuit: making money isn’t for more bets but to improve life itself.
True happiness must outweigh the thrill of trading so that you can slowly step away from that continuous leverage path.
Final Words
Today, after a few years, I finally understand what that veteran meant: the first pot of gold in life requires leverage. After that, if you can maintain over 10% annual compound interest, you’ll have peace of mind for life.
If you have 10 million dollars, with 10% annual interest, in 10 years, you’ll have about 26 million.
But how many in our industry, in the dead of night, still dream of the 10 million they once had?
The first pot of gold depends on judgment, courage, and luck; all subsequent wealth should rely on structure, discipline, and reverence for “drawdowns.”
Those fortunate enough to have completed their initial accumulation should not chase the steepest curves, avoid risks with unclear structures, and should not gamble with leverage and all-in for so-called “certainty.”
If you’ve just made money, stop! Enjoy real life, don’t let your brain fall into the wrong path.
— A shared encouragement with every fellow gambler, Let’s quit gambling early.
Repost from the Planet Daily boss’s article