Do you want a "smooth" life?

The ride of life is bumpy and it will have ups and downs.

In the past few years, as I have been researching Bitcoin, one of the things that I learned about was Bitcoin’s volatility. Many people avoid investing in Bitcoin because they cannot handle the ups and downs. It goes up 10x within 2 years, then crashes 80%. People get scared. They want an investment that goes up slowly and steadily. It may be mutual funds or fixed deposits.

Michael Saylor, a Bitcoin investment legend, beautifully said, “Volatility is Vitality.” If you go near Niagara Falls, the water is not a smooth-flowing river. It is violent and volatile. That’s because it’s a high-energy system. If you try to make it smoother, you will reduce it into a low-energy system. If you want to harness hydroelectric power from a waterfall, you must deal with the volatility, the aggressiveness, and the high energy.

This also made me think a lot about life. And my life. My life has been very volatile. I have also sometimes felt jealous of my friends who have a “smooth” life.

It’s the year 2025. It’s been 12 years since I started blogging at DigitalDeepak brand, 16 years since I started blogging, and 17 years since I started making some money online.

Until now, I have always chased “success” and tried to become better every year. Along this journey, I had a marriage, a kid, a divorce, and another marriage. Along this ride, I joined jobs, quit jobs, started companies, closed companies, had co-founders, and fired co-founders. I had team members and fired team members, and the list goes on.

Life is a bumpy ride. But it’s not a bad thing. Volatility is vitality. The richest and the most successful people in the world have had bumpy rides. Elon Musk almost went bankrupt when three of his rockets failed. Sam Altman was recently fired from Open AI and then got back in. Steve Jobs was fired from his own company as a CEO and bought his way back when Apple acquired NeXT.

We do not see their worst moments; we look at their glorious moments, and sometimes, we feel like they are lucky. Many people only look at the upside movement of Bitcoin and do not see 80% crashes. They call Bitcoiners lucky, but they do not realize how difficult it is to see your net worth wiped out by 80% every few years.

You do not deserve the best if you cannot handle the worst. If you are going through moments in your life where you feel like God is testing you, understand that the more you can handle the downs, the more capable you are of riding the ups.

In the money world, if you do not want volatility in your portfolio, you can invest in something “safe” like fixed deposits. You will get a stable return of 7-8% a year. You will not see your portfolio value go up and down violently. However, you will be poor in the long term because you will not beat inflation.

If you look for a “smooth” life, then there is a price to pay for it. I have plenty of friends who graduated from college with good marks and degrees, never took much risk in life, and followed the standard template of society - marry, have kids, hardly have sexual intimacy with wife, just do the duties, complain about the boss and drink on the weekends.

Their life looks smooth outside, but two decades of smoothness have killed the soul inside them. They are mostly unhappy and frustrated with their lives. They call me and complain about their boring lives. But that’s what they wanted. They wanted stability, smoothness, and blandness. They wanted vanilla ice cream, and they got it.

With the downs come the ups. If your life is not smooth, it has high energy. Learn to harness that energy for growth. You will grow beyond your wildest dreams. Let 2025 be a year of volatility in your life. Make major life-changing decisions. Quit that job if you hate your boss. Quit that marriage if things are not working with your spouse. Change your city if you are too bored with where you live. Shake things up. Break things. And you can build things.

Comment on this post and let me know - has your life been smooth so far?