You secretly want your crypto to go to zero. I know that's a crazy idea, and your mind is probably already violently resisting that any part of you would like anything except to be a crypto millionaire. I just got a message today on Patreon saying, "Jerry, someone stole my ICP. They had a lot of ICP too, much more than me. Can you help?" At first I'm like, well, I don't know anything I can do to get it back. But I can help in the learning, because I've had a lot of experiences that can be useful if you're in crypto.
The way I see it, there's some part of you that wants all of your crypto to be gone, that loves being poor, that loves being broke, that loves scarcity, that loves struggling, that loves being a victim, that loves being afraid. There's some part of you that would love to lose all your crypto. And this is true for almost all of us. Now, how big this part is — whether it's a vocal minority, or a tiny thought in the corner of our brain, or nearly the majority of our thinking — this is important to acknowledge and observe in yourself. Because I know there's some part of me that would be thrilled if I lost all my crypto. Why? Because it'd be an adventure to build it all up again.
I've taken my own crypto to zero before
How do I know? Because I've gone through this. In 10 years in crypto, I've lost all my crypto in one way or another, always through my own doing. My crypto portfolios went to zero several times. Now, usually I sold and took profits, but then years later I missed out on huge earnings because of selling and taking profits. Or I sold junk altcoins, and if I'd had them in something better, I'd have had huge earnings.
At first, I felt horrible that my crypto portfolio was at zero. I felt like such an idiot. But then there's an adventure. And right now I'm on the way to having a million dollar crypto portfolio. I literally don't have to do anything except wait, since I've got about 4,000 ICP. And I imagine within a year or a few years, that'll be worth millions of dollars. I literally don't have to do anything. In the past, though, I've been doing a lot of things. I didn't like having things too easy. Anytime I would get these good opportunities, I would do something, or put myself in a position, to lose them.
I'll give you some examples, because this will be really helpful for you to dig into and understand. If you can look at this in yourself now, in my experience this can prevent you from making bad crypto investments in many areas, and it can keep you out of situations where somebody steals your crypto — because to me, these are generally situations which you've attracted into your life. Now, I know there'll be people who whine that I'm victim blaming, and that you don't have control over life, and none of us chose to be here, and we're just all doing our best. I don't believe that. At the deepest level, I've come to believe that I'm creating this universe and everything that happens in it, and that everything that happens is some kind of a desire I have on the deepest level as the creator. Sometimes it doesn't make sense in the short term, and sometimes it's painful in the short term, but in the long term, it often makes sense. So let me explain how this has happened in my own life.
Why I really left the police department
From 2004, when I switched to criminal justice in college, I really wanted to be a police officer. So I worked for years to get there, including working in dangerous environments like a corrections facility, in order to get some experience to then get hired at a local police department. And then I ended up getting a job at what some people thought was the best police department in town. It had great pay. It wasn't as dangerous or difficult of a job. On the surface, you would think Jerry's totally made it. He's got the exact job he wanted. He's got the exact life he wanted. He should be happy, right?
But no. There was some part of me that was extremely dissatisfied with having everything perfectly in position. As soon as the adventure and the struggle of becoming a police officer and learning how to do it was mostly figured out — once I was comfortable being on the road, making arrests, the danger, the action — there was a part of me that got miserably bored and was desperate to exit that situation. But my conscious mind was stuck in: I'm in law enforcement, this is my career, this is what I've decided to do. And when you decide to do this, you have to have a career in law enforcement and retire, like my mother had a career in the military and retired. I remember sometimes sitting at work being so bored, thinking I should just go in the Air Force or something. My life was so easy. There was no struggle in it. I was making enough money. I was doing good at my job. It was too easy.
I remember one day making the decision. There was a coworker there that was really hot, and I'm like, you know what, I would love to date her. That would be so much fun. And I remember thinking: the consequence of doing that, it'll cost you this job and possibly this whole career. And I remember thinking, I don't care. What I had worked for for years, I don't care about it anymore. I just want fun and adventure and action, and if it costs everything else, even my life, I don't care. And that's exactly what happened. I went for the coworker, and I then ended up losing my job over that situation and my drinking a few months later.
At the time, my mind was all revved up about how it was the police department, and they treated me unfairly, and I didn't want this to happen, and I felt bad and guilty about it. But some part of me was thrilled. The day after they encouraged me to quit and I accepted their offer to quit, I was so relieved and happy to be taken out of that situation, because that opened up my life to all these possibilities that were previously closed. What initially was a very painful, struggle of an experience became an awesome thing that, looking back, I'm so happy I made that exact choice.
Now, I would prefer in the future to not have things be such a rough ride. I simply could have resigned from the police department without causing trouble, moved home with my parents, and gone to graduate school without all the drama. But at the time, my mind was so rigid that I just couldn't see quitting my job and moving home with my parents as something that was okay to do. So I manifested a situation where that would happen, but it would seem to happen to me. This is the kind of pattern I keep coming back to when I think about self-sabotage and the mountain being you.
Getting banned from Udemy was something I secretly wanted
Now, if you're wondering how this has to do with losing your crypto, I'm going to give you another story that will make it even clearer when it comes to money specifically. Because there's some part of many of us that hates to be financially secure, that hates financial independence, because it's too easy. We're conditioned and we're used to having that struggle. And if we don't have that struggle, then we have to face the rest of our life and our choices — taking a struggle away often reveals many others that were obscured, like when I got sober.
I was a Udemy instructor in 2014, right when I got sober, and I poured my heart and soul into filming thousands of videos for Udemy. I set my mind on becoming the number one instructor on the platform, and I got into the top 10. After I sold millions of dollars of courses, some months I made like a quarter million in sales, and the top month they paid me $90,000. Overall, I made $600-and-some thousand dollars on Udemy, most of it in 2015 and 2016.
Then one day they sent me an email, out of nowhere, banning my entire account. I was meticulously following all the policies, although I was in gray areas that didn't have policies written about them. I had no strikes or anything. They just took my entire account down all at once. That cost me thousands of dollars a day in income, which certainly by now would have been millions of dollars.
At the time I was ferociously mad — the same as I imagine you'd be if you suddenly had your ICP wallet stolen and it had tens of thousands of ICP in it. I imagine you'd be as mad as me having had my account taken down, and that you would feel like it was not your fault at all, that you did nothing to deserve it. Some part of you would feel guilty and acknowledge, yeah, I did participate in this somehow, but you would certainly think on the surface that under no circumstances did I want to be a part of this. I would certainly have thought: this was purely bad, I don't deserve this at all, this is not what I wanted.
But now when I look back, I see it differently. I just told my friend earlier — he's secretly had me coach him on Udemy for a long time, and he's been very successful. He dominates his niche, I showed him exactly how to do it, and he's been very stable and just continues to take the money in. Yet he's stifled from doing anything else in his life, because he's getting so much money that he doesn't want it to stop. He just keeps grinding out these courses and putting in all this work, and he won't do anything else with his life because this Udemy money is so good. I told him: I'm glad I got banned from Udemy, because I've had a lot of adventures in the last eight years since. I can see that there was some part of me that was desperate to get banned. Some part of me really wanted to stop all that income, because as long as I had all that income coming in, I was tied to it. I had to think about it and obsess about it, and therefore it blocked all these other things I could do.
I hated how easy success was
There was some part of me that hated being a big winner and making huge amounts of money. It hated the person I turned into — this egomaniac that everybody's got to talk to and is so successful and wants to be like, and then some people hate and get jealous of. Some part of me really hated how easy it was to just show up and teach and make a few videos, send a couple of emails out, and just have money pour into the bank. I'm glad that over the last eight years, one of the things I've finally leaned into is: I love financial security. And yet some part of me still hates financial security. Today, over the last week, I stopped accepting paid calls for $300 an hour, and the part of me that hates financial security loves that. It's like, good, we don't need those calls anymore. What I really want is my time. I want my time to be free. If learning to sit with being disliked for a choice like that interests you, it's a lot of what I get into with the courage to be disliked in crypto.
What I can see is that many times when it looks like we've been a victim of something, or it looks like we totally didn't have a part in it, because of the law of attraction we always have a part in everything that happens in our lives. We always have a part in everything we're creating, because — the way I believe it — we are the divine creator. And what can help make things easier is to look for that unacknowledged, hidden side. There's a part of me today, even though my life is fantastic. I have a happier marriage than I've ever seen anyone have before. My kids are healthy. Everything's going great. They're enjoying school, they're home right now, everyone is safe. I mean, obviously I've got the regular old stuff too. I have family members that are sick and in addiction that I choose not to be around, because they're so sick that I'm just not going to see it. I have yoga friends and AA friends. My body is as healthy as it's ever been. I have not been sick one day in over a year and a half.
And yet there's some part of me that would just love for everything to be annihilated. Because my life is so good right now that I don't want to hardly change anything. The majority just wants everything to stay the same. The downside of that is it kills off adventure. You might think my life was so miserably boring you couldn't stand to live in it for a single day. I'm like a robot at this point. I get up at 7am every day, get the kids ready for whatever they're going to do — school, or whatever adventures they're having on a weekend or in summer. I go to yoga at 9am most days with many of the same people that I'm very friendly with. I come home and I eat like a robot too, which is why I'm in good shape and not fat anymore. I've stripped junk food out of my eating. Then I go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting at noon or 5:30 or 7, and I show up and make whatever videos I want to.
There's a part of me that feels really uncomfortable not struggling, that loves the struggle and can't stand the ease. The part of you that thinks of money and views and success as the goal — that part can't stand making a bunch of money and getting a whole bunch of views and then having everybody want stuff out of me, everybody asking for my opinion about everything. There's a big part of me that feels stifled by that. And having tens of thousands of ICP is a level of financial security that can pull up some of those deep unconscious things and then make things happen to lose it.
Why I think most people in crypto are losing on purpose
This is why so many people buy all these junk crypto coins. What I see is that crypto is mostly people losing money and wasting time, which is why I choose not to make crypto videos most days. I've seen so many people that have had lots of money in the bank and then lost it in crypto. And what I see from the outside is that you don't like financial security. That's going to come as a blow to some of you. Some of you are going to be like, that's ridiculous, I didn't want this to happen. Well, why did it happen? "I don't know, Jerry, I don't control everybody and everything that happens in life." Maybe you do, maybe you don't, but you definitely set your attraction point. You definitely set your expectations on what happens. And your beliefs, even if they're unconscious, often drive the situations you get into. If you want to see how I think through all of this, I keep these conversations going in my Money playlist.
If you manage to lose a bunch of money in crypto, like I did in 2014 — I lost thousands of dollars I'd borrowed — or like when I made myself broke in 2019, it all started inside, on my thinking and my feelings and my identification. Then I blew all the money on bad business ideas, or poorly executed business ideas. But you know what? At the bottom of it, when I was borrowing money on cash advances at like 20% interest just to make the minimum payments, part of me loved it. It loved the adventure. It loved the suspense. It loved the tension. It loved the pressure. Because the downside of not having tension and pressure and stress is that there's not much motivation to really change and learn and grow. You really have to learn how to be comfortable and to proactively seek growth opportunities out. Otherwise your conscious mind will think, I'm building wealth, I'm getting rich, and unconsciously your mind will be saying, I'm destroying you financially.
The year 2019 for me was: if you asked me what I'm doing, I'd say I'm making a business that will sell for billions of dollars one day, I'm going to get investors, I'm going to make a platform better than Udemy. But my unconscious mind was like, we're going to destroy him. And my unconscious mind got exactly what it wanted. At the bottom of my financial situation in 2019, there was part of me that loved it. That loved being at the bankruptcy lawyer, that loved being an utter failure — when the year before I was this big guy in crypto, making hundreds of thousands of dollars, unloading my wallet on people who didn't know any better, and who also wanted to be broke and lose their money. Part of me was really satisfied for the adventure, the opportunity, the difficulty of the situation. Because it's like playing a video game that's really easy.
Sure, it's fun to win at first. I played this addictive game called Marvel Snap, and I quit it — I'm a week or so off of playing Marvel Snap now for the third time, which is great. When you first play it, it lets you win almost all the time, because you play against bots. The first few bots you beat, it's cool, but it quickly gets to be this empty feeling. And ironically, the way the game sets you up — where you win a bunch at first, and then you start losing — the losing ends up being more painful. I'd feel stupid for losing the game, but I'd feel almost nothing for winning it.
Most of us have never seen real poverty
Many of us that have enough money to put tens of thousands of dollars into crypto have so much financial and material abundance that we've been winning our entire lifetime relative to real poverty. Many of you have never seen real poverty. I've never seen real poverty firsthand. I've lived in the ghetto — I lived in a place that was under $400 a month in rent when I was a corrections officer. I've been relatively poor compared to my neighbors in the USA. But most of us have never even seen real poverty: people who can't get clean water, who have no electricity, whose children are starving to death. Most of us are so materially wealthy that the only reason we feel like we're broke is because we enjoy the struggle, because we choose to see broke and poverty instead of abundance.
At least in the USA, there are so many places to live. There's so much food. There are so many people that need companionship. There are pretty much infinite opportunities here to work with other people, to love other people, to have several people live in a house together and share the rent and work together. I've seen all kinds of innovative communities come together — five or six single people will all rent a house out together and live in it, and even if they have low-paying jobs, they can easily afford to pay their bills and everything. There's so much abundance in the world that often it's only losing something that can really even get us to feel.
Many of us are desperate to feel something, even if it's to feel something bad. We're desperate for an interesting story to tell people, even if it's a bad thing. The person who messaged me on Patreon that they lost tens of thousands of ICP — that's a noteworthy story. If you'd held onto your tens of thousands of ICP, that wouldn't have got my attention enough to make a video about it. Winning and doing well is ironically something we take so much for granted that it's not even interesting.
I've shared these ideas with you because once you get conscious of the bigger picture — the depth of your desires — it can help you more consciously manifest and navigate things more smoothly. Because obviously the majority of me loves having 4,000 ICP. I love it. I love financial security, because now I have real freedom. I can make music, like I'm doing on my Spotify and my Jerry Banfield and Jerry Banfield music channels. I've got time because of the ICP I've got, and because my wife works, I have financial security indefinitely. The majority of me is really happy with it. But there's some minority part of my spirit or brain or whatever that doesn't want that, that loves the struggle. And what I've found is that the more you clear out your bigger and bigger struggles — and a lot of times your financial struggles will blot out all the other struggles — the more you clear out the other struggles in your life. This is part of why I've come to believe that being bored in crypto is a sign of success.
Financial abundance forces you to face everything else
If you truly get financial abundance in your life, you'll be forced to deal with all the other struggles in your life — your relationships with your friends and your family, your history, your traumas, your addictions. Sometimes financial security and stability will bring out the worst of those qualities in you. Like if you have an inferiority complex, which I certainly did in 2015 and 2016: when I got to be a big deal online and I was making all this money, my inferiority complex manifested as a superiority complex, and I went nuts making videos about how great I am. Part of me wanted all that to stop, to get some humility — to recognize that other people are giving you all this money, and other people can stop giving you all this money whenever they want to. It's not that you're some superior being because you've got people to buy your online courses. Other people are doing it for you, and they can stop doing it for you whenever they want. Some part of me really wanted the humility of earning an ordinary income.
If you can tap into this stuff, you can face some of these things that will manifest unconsciously, seemingly without you having to do anything. For example, almost none of us would consciously volunteer to have our ICP stolen. But some of us clearly put ourselves in a position for it. If you were to ask me what you're doing, I would say you don't really care about your crypto portfolio or your wealth. If you're buying meme coins, if you're investing in most cryptos outside of ICP, I would say you don't really care about wealth and financial security — because if you did, to me, the wealth and financial security coin is ICP, based on 10 years in crypto, thousands of hours of research, and thousands of cryptos and altcoins that I've looked at: the technology, the team, and so on. That's my opinion, not financial advice.
Most of crypto is filled with people who are in this never-enough mindset, including many crypto creators. I was very much manifesting this myself too, up until very recently, when I realized: okay, you're going to be an ICP millionaire. Are you going to make videos every day trying to sell people on ICP when you're an ICP millionaire and everybody knows about it? No. Well, then why are you doing those now? Act as if. Always act as if. You can see, based on your actions, the totality of what you really want.
You can see what someone really wants by their actions
For example, there was this amazing girl who spoke at a speaker meeting in AA one night. She talked about how she would go out and get drunk, and stay out late, and go out by herself. And then one night she was victimized because of that. She consciously wouldn't have said, I want this to happen to me, going out. But by her behavior, you could see that she wasn't totally opposed to it either. And it was amazing to see that she took responsibility. She's like, I knew the decisions I was making were bad, and I knew the consequences could be bad, and I just kept making them anyway.
That's what a lot of us do in crypto. We keep buying these coins that are bad. On some level we know it, but consciously we're telling ourselves we're going to get rich. And sometimes in the short term, some of you showed me a meme coin that pumped above ICP, and I'm like, that's a short-term thing, it's not reflective of the bigger picture. It's a reality where, yes, you may not ever directly think, I want this bad thing to happen to me — but do you put yourself in a position for bad things to happen to you?
Does some part of you? I remember, as a police officer, I used to fantasize that I would be the one — that I'd pull a car over and I'd be the officer down, and then everybody would remember me so fondly, and they'd have their little black tape on their badges. I often used to fantasize about that. I thought, that'd be such a great way for me to go out, because I was afraid of having a really disappointing life. If nothing bad happened to me, I was afraid of causing bad things and hurting people myself. So when I was a police officer, I used to hope that if anything bad was going to happen, I was on duty for it. I wanted a chance to be the hero, even if it cost me my life. And I realize how insane that looks now.
Take responsibility, and let it become empathy
What I want you to do is really to take responsibility for the things you can change, and to look at yourself at a deeper level, and to ask other people what things look like to them. Because sometimes the ideas that look really good to me — like all these business ideas I had in 2019 — looked really stupid to a lot of people outside me. My friends, for the most part, refused to loan me money and made it clear they didn't think I was making good decisions. It's like that girl in her speaker meeting: everybody told her she shouldn't be going out alone downtown in the city, and she didn't listen to anybody. And it's still sad. It's still tragic when things happen to people — when you lose your ICP wallet, or you get hurt, or whatever it is. The bright side is that it gives us a chance to help each other and to work together. This is exactly the kind of thing I love going deeper on directly with people in the Jerry Banfield Family.
I find that sometimes my life's going so well that it can be difficult for me to have empathy for anyone else. When I saw this message about the ICP wallet, at first it was hard for me to have empathy, because of how I understand reality to work — like, well, I guess you wanted somebody to steal your wallet. That's honestly my first thought on the deepest level. But then I go deeper. It's like, well, did you want to lose your job as a police officer? Did you want to get banned from Udemy? Did you want to be in the worst financial situation in your life in 2019? If bad things happen to people I love in the future, did they want those to happen? Sometimes bad stuff does just happen in life. And the only silver lining is that it gives us a chance to help each other and to have empathy for other people. When I thought of all the stuff that seemed like it was bad, that seemed like it happened to me, I needed a lot of other people's help to get through that stuff. And the benefit is that now I'm in a place where I can do that for someone else.
I'm really happy with what I do have. And I do have enough, even though there were times in 2018 where I had much more crypto than I do today. Back then, the nearly a million dollars at one point of crypto I had was not enough. Today, 4,000 ICP is plenty. Sometimes having something bad happen — like losing your crypto, or buying a meme coin that goes to zero — yes, it can be a painful experience. But you can turn that pain into learning and into empathy for other people. You can understand other people more than they even understand themselves. Because I'm imagining this guy that had his wallet stolen, with tens of thousands of ICP — he's financially set for life. And on some level, I imagine he'd never considered that some part of himself might not want to be set for life, might want to have to struggle financially. Because if you don't have to struggle financially, then you might have to get into all these other issues in your life. And sometimes financial success means all your other issues actually get worse.
The world I'd really like to see
So this is my experience, and I hope this has helped. I would prefer a world where we don't even use money at all, where we just focus on giving to the collective, and make our needs and our desires clear to the collective, and we all operate telepathically on energy exchange. I know that sounds real hippie-dippy and dreamy. But to me, that's the future I'd like to see — where we don't even use money. That way, no one can steal your money. You just give in a spirit of joy, you receive in a spirit of joy, and you make sure you're giving in proportion to what you're receiving. So maybe, in the future, we won't even have money to steal.