Adam on Nostr: For me, it was food. Went from college athlete to morbidly obese. The sensation of ...

For me, it was food. Went from college athlete to morbidly obese. The sensation of eating just hit me different. Every bite was euphoric.

I found my greater addiction in Bitcoin. I have embraced it consuming my thoughts almost every waking moment because it keeps the demons at bay.

I’m nearly back to college level physique. I recognize my younger spirited self again, undoing decades of selling out daily in the pursuit of fiat and social acceptance, turning to food for fleeting pleasure after each exhausting day of masking.

I am fortunate to have rediscovered Bitcoin. It’s a mind virus that rewires the brain and leaves no room for other infectious thoughts. It’s freed me.

And it’s wonderful to recognize myself again, after all these years.

quoting nevent1q…934j

About 12 or so years ago I was asked to go to an event in Kelowna, British Columbia to pitch my SaaS company to around 15 prominent venture capitalists and a conference of attendees.

The company was doing ok for a startup with a few thousand paying enterprise customers at $19 per month but to build up the validation drama for the company I mentioned that we already had offers to sell the company (we did but it was an acqui-hire type of offer).

When a VC asked me why I didn't already sell the company then, I told him I'd be bored and just start doing drugs or something.

The vc's mildly smirked, the room laughed out loud, and one person in the third row of the room stared me down deadpanned with beady eyes.

He waited patiently in a line of about 5 people to talk to me after my presentation was over.

He was in a suit which was odd for the startup scene and the weather in BC at that time. He was there to pitch his own company that he helped co-found.

He did not introduce himself when he walked up to me and just said something like:

"You know what's interesting about what you said about drug addiction is that the only thing that works at breaking an addiction is that you have to find something that you love more than the addiction.

Nothing else works.

In the clinical studies we've seen in mice, mice will forego eating, fornicating and eventually die from a cocaine addiction for example once they try cocaine once.

So the studies in the addiction space that are interesting to us are not who's never tried drugs because those subjects just had the discipline not to start. What's interesting to us to study is who has actually beat addictions and what was that thing that they loved more."

For a midwit like myself that was a jaw dropping revelation to me.

For someone who was addicted to pain meds with addiction challenges in my family, it was a revelation that was personal and one that I've obsessed about to this day.

I explained to this guy that what he just said to me was so fascinating that he should post this on Quora. He asked about what Quora was. I explained to him that people invited me to this event not because of my company doing well but because I wrote a post on Quora on what it's like to be a startup founder that went viral.

The next morning at this event, he was the only one sitting by himself at breakfast so I went and sat with him.

He said, "You know what, Paul, I checked out that Quora thing you talked about and wrote something.”

When I got up from breakfast, I saw a friend that observed me leaving the table with him who said something along the lines of, "That guy's fucking out there eh?".

I confidently replied that I found him to be the most interesting person I've met in a long time.

A couple of weeks later I saw a Quora post notification that said, "30 Rules for Life” by Jordan Peterson.