Getting honest about your skill investing in crypto is an essential starting point that will make everything else so much easier. The truth, from my point of view, is that most people in retail who are investing in crypto are shockingly bad at not just crypto investing, but investing generally. There is great news in that, though. Once you look at it and realize, wow, my crypto investing skills are close to zero, then you can get motivated to learn and do better.
The trap is that if you are not honest about your crypto investing skill — and let's be honest, most of us when we started, and even me, I would say nine years ago, possibly even today — most of us think we are better than we actually are. This is very dangerous, because God forbid something actually goes well for you and you just kind of get lucky buying a meme coin before it pumps, or buying some crypto coin right before a narrative hits. Then you think you are really good, and that sets you up to get destroyed.
This is the second lesson in my free Learn Cryptocurrency course. If you haven't watched the intro lesson, I'd suggest going back and watching that first so you understand why we're here. The number one lesson I see that needs to be communicated is that you need to take an honest inventory of your current skill at crypto investing. Because if you already think you are an expert, if you already think you are really good at crypto investing, then you will generally not want to learn anything new.
Take an honest inventory of where you are
The more you know, the more you keep learning. I'm a YouTube creator. I've uploaded 5,000-plus videos on YouTube, something like 10,000 videos online, and I am still watching how-to-do-YouTube videos. I am always looking for an extra tip, always looking to improve my craft. So if you want to be better at crypto investing, you really need to be honest about where you are at, not overstate your position, and get clear about where you want to go. If you want to be really good at crypto investing, you can't get there from saying, oh, I'm an expert already.
The more you identify your level of crypto investing, the more you can be drawn to a mentor who has what you want. If you want me to talk with you and do more direct mentoring, you can come ask me questions directly inside the Jerry Banfield Family.
So let's get honest. If you have been in crypto less than a year and you have no, or almost no, experience investing outside of throwing money into mutual funds or things like that in a retirement account, then more than likely — there's probably a 90-plus percent chance, if you're watching this — the truth is you are a beginner. You are a beginner at crypto investing. I don't care if you got lucky or even made a good call here or there; most of you are still, generally, a beginner.
Now, if you have been in crypto at least five years and you have researched hundreds of cryptos, then it's possible you might have a little bit of skill. That said, if you still find yourself making bad decisions like buying meme coins that you lose money in, or if you're watching the price all the time, there's an opportunity to learn a lot more.
What I think an expert crypto investor actually looks like
I would classify an expert crypto investor as two different basic profiles.
If you're an expert, you are able to make really smart crypto investments with a very small amount of time. That, I would say, is the retail — not professional — level of expert in crypto. For example, if you spent very little time researching crypto, found my videos, loaded up on ICP, locked it up for eight years, and are just taking the rewards, you probably have expert potential, at least. Because what most people do is get sucked into all these altcoins and put a whole bunch of time and energy in, only to lose money. That said, if you did that, you still might have lots to learn about the basics and other areas of crypto.
The second way I would say you are truly an expert at crypto is if this is what you do professionally. And I would hesitate to even say I am an expert at crypto. I've done this for 10 years. I've researched thousands of altcoins. To me, true expertise is to be able to take a huge amount of complex ideas and simplify them. The best indication of my own skill at crypto investing, in my experience, is being able to find a low-risk, high-reward crypto that's drastically undervalued and has very little speculation to it — which, to me, is Internet Computer Protocol — and then to find a couple of projects I like under that.
Expert-level investing is spotting the outlier
To me, that's expert-level crypto investing: I've looked at thousands of these altcoins, I've looked at and used all kinds of different technology, and I've found out of all of that what is truly an outlier. Expert-level crypto investing, to me, is being able to identify outliers. Outliers are things that are not like everything else. So if you look at the top 100 cryptos, I would say that if you're an expert, you should be able to point out the one outlier — the one that's not like anything else on the rest of those charts, the one that is the least well understood and that has the most potential. And generally, if you've researched all 100 cryptos, or most of them, to a meaningful level, the conclusion I've come to is that Internet Computer Protocol is that outlier. It's not like the other stuff in the top 100. After researching thousands of coins myself, ICP is the one altcoin I love.
My hope is that you can rapidly level up your experience at crypto investing by watching this course. But you can't do that without getting honest about where you're at. And if you're a beginner, that's okay.
Why asking questions is the real skill
A lot of us in life try to put on a front, and we're encouraged to always act smarter than we are, to act like we know more. But that prevents us from asking those dumb questions. It's really asking all of those questions that will make you smarter at anything in life. It's asking for advice. To me, someone who has a high level of crypto experience is very willing to ask for help and ask for advice when they don't know what to do.
I'm really proud of all of you in the YouTube community. A few days ago I posted saying, I don't know what to do — should I sell my Tagger? I posted asking, because my integrity and my value as a creator were coming into conflict with what my crypto research suggested. My expertise as a crypto investor was telling me I was over-invested in this coin called Tagger, a micro cap on ICP. A few days ago I had over $10,000 or so of it, and meanwhile I only had about $30,000 or $40,000 of ICP. To me, ICP should be 90-plus percent of my portfolio, so I had gone in a little heavy on Tagger. I bought a lot of it under $3.
And yet my integrity as a content creator was saying I shouldn't sell my Tagger, because I had just told everybody how this could 100x — it's not ethical to sell my Tagger right after that. So what did I do? I asked for your advice. I explained that I had put so much money in and that I needed some more money in the bank just to pay my bills. I wrote a long post explaining it, and I'm really grateful for the comments you all gave. If you want to get better at something, asking for advice and asking questions is how you learn. That's the whole reason I'm doing a complete crypto course — because if you realize you are a crypto beginner, you don't even know what questions to ask yet. If conversations like that are your thing, I keep them going in my Money playlist.
The four levels of skill
There's a scale of skill at anything. It's a four-level set of skill indicators, and the first level is unconscious incompetence, where you are so incompetent you don't even see how bad at something you are.
Unconscious incompetence
Like when I started making music, I was so bad at it that I couldn't even figure out what to learn or where I could get better. In crypto investing, unconscious incompetence means that everything just looks confusing. You watch one video and you automatically think that's how it is. You watch another video and now you think that's how it is. It's really confusing. And unconscious incompetence often comes with arrogance — actually thinking you're way smarter than you are. When I first started buying Bitcoin, my unconscious incompetence led me into trading Bitcoin. When you're unconscious of how incompetent you are, you are really vulnerable. That's the majority of crypto: retail investors who are so bad at crypto investing that they don't even see the questions they should be asking to learn and get better.
So I'm hoping that going forward, you can be free from the delusion that you are a crypto expert — that there's lots of room for you, and for me, to learn and to get better at crypto investing. Get honest. Honesty is often where you get set free.
Conscious incompetence
The level above unconscious incompetence is conscious incompetence, and that's what I'd like you to get to with crypto as soon as possible. Conscious incompetence is where you start to see the things you don't know that you should find out about.
For example, unconscious incompetence in crypto is watching videos and just buying — my mind's going, don't say Hex, don't say Hex. Unconscious incompetence in crypto is buying Hex because you see a bunch of people flexing and posting pictures of cars. You don't even realize how bad you are at crypto investing. Then you think Hex is awesome because of confirmation bias, and then you think the price is so low because of anchoring bias, since you saw it at a higher rate before.
Conscious incompetence is starting to realize, okay, I'm starting to figure out what I don't know that I don't know. For example, you're watching one of my videos and you realize I keep saying anchoring bias, and you realize you have no idea what anchoring bias is. I'm going to cover that soon in a new lecture, because you need to understand what anchoring bias is if you're investing in crypto. The short version: anchoring bias is that the first time you see a price, that tends to become your anchor, where that just feels like the right price, because that's the first time you saw it. Then every impression you have after that gets connected with your anchoring bias.
For example, the first time I really paid attention to the price of Internet Computer Protocol, it was around six or seven dollars. So for me, it being around that same price still looks like a great value, because I think it's going to go up and it's still around where I first saw it. When I saw the price drop to three dollars after first finding it at six or seven, it was a very easy buy for me based on my research. But other people who had an anchoring bias where Internet Computer was at, say, a hundred dollars, and who were stuck in confirmation bias thinking about how great it was — for them, watching it drop to three dollars was horrifying. Where you first saw it determines everything; for them it was like, oh my God, this is a total rug pull, I'm totally wrong about this, and I have to sell everything. It was the same for me with Bitcoin. This is why it's so hard to buy low and sell high: because of both anchoring bias and confirmation bias and several other things I'll bring in.
But you see, when you're in conscious incompetence, at least you start to realize, oh, I don't know anything about emotions and investing. I don't even understand why I buy things high and sell them low. I don't understand what anchoring bias is. I don't know what confirmation bias is. There are so many things like that, and you start to realize, okay, I want to learn this, I want to learn that. When I'm doing music production and I started to reach a level of conscious incompetence, I started to realize, oh, I need to learn how to use this synthesizer, or I need to learn why this note sounds good next to that note. I know how to hear, okay, why do drums sound this way, how do I put a drum rack together in Ableton — I don't know how to do that. That's where you start to feel a little bit better.
Conscious competence
The more you start to ask questions and figure out what you don't know, the more you can get into the next level, which is conscious competence, where you start to know what you're doing but you have to think about it. You've got to essentially write it all down or plan it all out, really make sense of it and lay it out. For example, with music production, I'd say I'm at a conscious competence level. I know how to make a song pretty quickly, I know how to throw a drum rack together, I know how to do all these things on synthesizers — I've made over 200 songs now. I have conscious competence in certain areas, and there are many other areas I don't know about, but I still have to really think a lot. It's not something I can do effortlessly yet.
Unconscious competence
The final level is unconscious competence, where you are so good at whatever it is you're doing — generally because you've put so many hours into it — that you can do it without even thinking anymore. My friend who's just fantastic at music production can touch the keyboard and make a beautiful sound without hardly thinking about it. I still have to think about what I should hit and why I should hit it.
With crypto investing, unconscious competence is where you get so good that you don't hardly have to think anymore. You can look at something and just get a feeling almost immediately. When I go to CoinMarketCap and look at a project I've never seen before, I've looked at so many coins that I'll just click on it and start to get a feeling. I'll look at a price chart, see how long it's been out, scroll down and look at it, and I just start to get a feeling for it based on immediately looking at it. My feeling looking at most coins right away is, ill — this is kind of nasty. That's unconscious competence: I've looked at thousands and thousands and thousands of altcoins, and my first impression looking at one is, yuck, gross. That's my first feeling for almost every crypto I look at. Except when I go to Internet Computer — then I get really turned on. I'm like, yeah, look at this price chart, and hardly anybody's figured this out yet.
That's what I want you to be able to get to: a level of unconscious competence with your crypto investing, where you can just look at something really quickly. You can scroll through and watch somebody's video, search through crypto videos, see whatever is out there, and immediately start to detect what matters. I'll just randomly search crypto, and immediately I start looking: don't buy crypto now — that's terrible advice. Major Bitcoin signal detected — waste of my time. US Treasury steps — useless. Something diabolical happening with Bitcoin — extremely unlikely. Danger lurks in the market. You're going to get completely annihilated. Unnecessary traders talking — unnecessary. Market update — unnecessary. The best crypto bet you can make right now, paid promotion — unlikely there's any useful information in there. You can go through and get so effective that you rip through video after video, and then, okay, this one probably has some useful information, this one is probably really good, there are probably some nice gems in there.
Getting to a place where crypto feels easy
So that's what I've hoped to communicate here: you can get honest about where you're at and see where you could possibly go. At the highest level of crypto investing, you can start to sift through huge amounts of content and automatically be drawn to the stuff that's actually interesting. The better you get at crypto investing, the more you'll see that almost everybody is just wasting your time. It's shocking how little a lot of people know about what really matters. There are lots of people whose technical analysis and Bitcoin trading signals you simply don't need to know — for 99 percent of you, that's a waste of time. I'm not going to teach that, because I don't think it's the most effective way to use your time. If you want to go deeper on how I separate the signal from the noise, that's also why I fired myself and quit crypto hype for real education.
If you can get honest about where you're at today, most likely you are a beginner. Most likely, if you're at unconscious incompetence where you don't even know how bad you are at crypto investing, this course will very quickly help you level up to: okay, I know what questions I need to ask, I know what I need to learn about. Then I want to get you at least to conscious competence, where you feel confident in what you're doing, you know what to look for, and you know what to avoid. You could get to a place where, if you stepped into my shoes, you'd think crypto was shockingly easy. Lots of days I just rip through this whole feed and go, okay, nothing useful today on any of the big channels. That's my vision.
If you're brand new to all of this, it also helps to use the tech before you buy so the names stop being abstract.
Where to go from here
I really love filming this course for you. If you did not watch the first part, definitely watch it to give you a big-picture overview. This entire course is available for free, and I'll put out a video every day at the same time.
If you want to speed up and learn as fast as possible, getting a mentor is the best way to do that. You're welcome to come learn with me and ask questions directly in the Jerry Banfield Family, and maybe I'll have a mastermind at some point in the future as well. Thanks for being here — I hope to see you on the third lesson.