2018: got out of the Marines broke. 2020: locked in. Monk mode. Meditate, write, read, work. Hit $10K/month. Then I started enjoying life. Dropped to $2K. Moved to Colombia. Locked in harder. Hit $20K/month and $300K in my portfolio. Moved to Bogotá. Had fun. Trips, drinks, chasing stuff. A year later — zero. Quarter million gone. Moved to Dunham. Locked in. Back to $15K. Got comfortable. Fell off again. Medellín. Locked in. $20K+. Now Sogamoso. Rent dropped from $2,700 to $450. Didn't need to grind to survive. So I took my foot off the gas. Hard. Two days ago I realized this might be the worst financial month I've had in years. It always comes back to three things: Write. Read. Meditate. Stop those, everything collapses. Here's why it matters for what we do: Digging a ditch for 9 hours? I can do that hungover. Dumb work doesn't care how you feel. Investing, online business, content — that runs on willpower. Not muscle. And willpower runs on meditation. If you can't sit still for 10 minutes a day, you won't have what it takes for the hard stuff. The micro practice IS the macro. The real killer right now is dopamine. I got back into doomscrolling. Open Instagram, 30 seconds later you've seen a billionaire giving away money, a Dubai sunset, and a dog getting rescued. Your brain wasn't built for that. Dopamine isn't pleasure. It's motivation. Spike high → crash below baseline → now the normal stuff (writing, working, recording) feels impossible. You don't have fuel for it. Doomscroll, p***, sugar, video games — then try to do the hard thing? Not happening. You can't reset in 10 minutes. You're cooked for the day. The fix: Wake up. Don't touch your phone. No music. No sweets. Go straight into the work. Keep dopamine LOW in the morning. Then EARN it through meditation, writing, reading. Once you meditate, everything else becomes fun — because you finally have the capacity to do it. Take this from me: A bad month doesn't make you lazy. You just broke your system. Reset. Rebuild.