The Secret to a Good Life

Andy Snyder|December 8, 2021

Here’s the secret to life…

We’re serious.

As we’ll show you, it works for everything any of us are concerned about… money… love… our jobs… our kids… even the dopes who think they’re in charge of it all.

It’s wise advice that was given to us by a good friend, a man who changed our life.

“If you want to change somebody else,” he said, “change yourself.”

He then told the story of his wife and him. He abused booze. He took their relationship for granted. And he wasn’t much of a dad.

She left him.

He drank more.

He tried to change her. He tried to show her how great he was… how she was the one who was missing the point.

None of it worked.

She called a lawyer. A good, expensive one.

Then, in what he describes as an act of reckless desperation, he tried something radical. He changed himself.

He quit drinking. He started working out. He looked in the mirror each morning and held himself accountable.

Blame had no place in his life unless the finger was pointing at him.

Today, his wife adores him. His kids overwhelm him with love. And he went from sleeping on his friend’s couch to becoming a millionaire business owner in just a few years.

And it can all be traced back to switching his focus from changing others to changing himself.

Easy, Right?

Now, dear friend, here’s where we’ve got to level with each other.

What he did is incredibly hard… really, really incredibly hard.

It’s like another story we recently heard. This one was about a fat guy… a really fat guy.

His doctor told him he needed to lose 100 pounds or he’d die within two years.

A year went by and the clock was counting down, but the scale was not.

Then he got the worst call a father could get. His daughter was dying. She needed a kidney. And it turned out that he was the only one who could provide it.

But he was too fat to go on the operating table. He hadn’t lost any weight. The doctors wouldn’t kill him to save her.

So he did what he had to. He went on a diet, became a hero at the gym and lost the weight. He saved his daughter.

He didn’t love himself enough to do it. But he loved his daughter plenty.

“So what’s your point, Andy? Did you have a little too Irish of a coffee this morning?”

Glad you asked…

You see, we’re worried. We’ve been through a lot lately. And we’ve rocked back in our chair and stared at the ceiling long enough that we think we have a bit of a solution to it all.

You’ll want to pay attention to this.

Be Unusual

It starts with some research we did last week into this whole “death of cash” thing we’ve been preaching. We found a case where a couple of cops took $90K in cash from a veteran just because driving from one state to the next with that much cash was “unusual.”

He didn’t commit a crime. He simply didn’t trust banks and wanted to be personally accountable for his life savings.

It sounds straightforward. But in today’s world, it’s unusual.

And these days, simply being “unusual” is enough for the government to step in.

We see it everywhere.

Want to use a cheap drug that Big Pharma hasn’t bothered to ask for the FDA’s approval? Well, that’s “unusual.” Good luck getting permission.

Or perhaps, like us, you want to start a business that’s unique and different. By definition, it’s “unusual.”

Lawyers have helped. But we’re taking things to a higher power… the ultimate power. Next week, we’ve got a breakfast meeting set with a local preacher who says he can get us in with the good ol’ boys.

Maybe then we won’t appear so odd to the locals.

But where these cocks really come home to roost is in the realm of big money… where an army of acronyms keeps us all safe from the lunatics and the unusual.

We recently did some digging on what the SEC is up to and who it’s putting through the ringer.

It’s like a circus sideshow… the freaks of Wall Street. And Elon Musk is the four-hoofed bearded lady.

The man in the fancy suit is cracking his whip at ol’ Elon once again.

The SEC says a whistleblower has filed a complaint about Musk’s failure to notify shareholders about defects in Tesla solar panels.

It comes on top of a host of other SEC accusations… dealing with everything from outright fraud to the dangers of Musk’s tweets.

In fact, his naysayers are out this week accusing Musk of using Twitter to “manipulate” Google’s search results to cover up news articles about the SEC case.

Here’s a news flash… Google and its keepers are the good ol’ boys of the internet.

Manipulation is the name of the game.

We say Tesla shareholders don’t mind all that much, anyhow. Shares are up 700% over the last two years.

Clearly the bearded lady is good at her act.

But it’s not just freaks at Tesla the clowns are chasing.

They’ve also gone after a host of the carmaker’s rivals… Nikola, Canoo and Lordstown Motors – all the dreamers that are doing things differently.

And… big surprise… Trump’s new SPAC deal has also been pulled into the interrogation room.

They’re even going after the oldest freaks of them all this week… gold bugs.

It seems as though anything different… anything usual… is getting a second look. The freaks and the lunatics are being forced to comply with the “norms.”

It’s all over.

It’s dumb and dangerous.

So Change

You don’t have to succumb to it. You don’t have to sleep on the couch and let the old lady walk out on you.

After all, many of the companies the SEC is looking at (which have likely done nothing wrong) have put serious dough in their investors’ pockets.

Thank goodness the folks in charge of them have the gumption to keep pushing.

For your own solution, you just have to look back to the top of this essay. Don’t think you’ll be changing anybody else anytime soon. Your chants won’t change the rhetoric. Your begging… groveling… and promises of change will do no good. Neither will griping about all of this over the dinner table.

But you can change yourself… the way you invest… the way you think of it all… and the way you react when the authorities try to corral you and move you out of the way.

You, too, can become a freak. You can change the way you think and act. You can join the sideshow and be proud of it.

More of us need to do it.

You don’t have to conform. It only brings mediocrity and slow, long-term suffering.

Not happy with your investments? Not excited about where you’ve ended up?

Stop being so usual.

“But, Andy,” you say, “there’s no way. It’s too hard.”

That’s what the fat fellow said too.

But then he found a better reason to change.

He saved himself and his most beloved.

Perhaps that’s what so many of us need… a bit better of a reason to change our ways.

Wanna get rich?

Don’t wait for your neighbor to change.

Change yourself. Step away from the crowd. And join the freak show.

That, after all, is the secret to a good life.