I'm a big fan of investments. Like — a massive fan. Because to me, money is the game. Not a game I love for its own sake, but the game we all got drafted into the moment we were born into this world. These are the rules. These are the points on the scoreboard. And within that game, investing is the thing that changes everything.
Sure, how much you can earn actively matters. Of course it does. But no matter how hard you work, no matter how much you pull in with a salary or a business — if you can't invest, you will never win this game. You'll just be running on a treadmill with better shoes.
I got into this early. I was around 16 when the interest sparked. And by 18, the first thing I did with real money was open an investment account. Then I lost all of it. Every last złoty I'd earned from my first job.
That was the best thing that ever happened to me. Because I got to feel the full emotional weight of losing everything — while the "everything" was still small.
That pain? At that amount? It was the cheapest education I ever got. If you're going to learn the hard lesson, learn it when the stakes are manageable. Learn it before there's a mortgage attached to your decisions.
Now — fast forward to today. The markets are fucked. Genuinely, visibly fucked. There are black swan events stacked on top of each other to the point where they stop being black swans and start being scheduled programming. The recession is sitting right there, in front of everyone, and it just keeps getting pushed and pushed and pushed. And when that next dump comes — and it's coming — I think it's going to be one of the biggest we've seen in our lifetime. 2008 will look like a warm-up.
Am I 100% certain? No. Nobody ever is. But the signals are loud. I don't want to break them down here, that's not the point of this chapter, and honestly I don't have the energy for it.
The point is: why sit and wait? Waiting costs money. Inflation is eating your cash while you try to be "careful."
And that's how, for the first time in my life, I ended up inside Treasury bonds.
And I am amazed by what these things are. This is the safest investment you can find on this planet. Basically 100% risk-free. The only way a US Treasury bond fails is if the entire financial world we live in collapses — and if that happens, your portfolio isn't your biggest problem anyway. So if you remove the apocalypse from the equation, these things are bulletproof.
Here's the part that blew my mind.
Before I really understood Treasury bonds, I assumed inflation was the floor. The minimum you'd lose by doing nothing. If inflation is 5%, your cash loses 5% sitting in the bank. Simple.
But that's not actually true. Because "doing nothing" isn't just sitting in a bank. The real "doing nothing" is parking your money in Treasury bonds, because the access is that easy and the risk is that low. So the true inflation — the real headwind you're fighting — is inflation minus the Treasury bond yield.
That's the real current of the river you're swimming against. Most people are calculating it wrong.
It reframes everything. Suddenly, the river isn't as fast as you thought. The current is softer. You have more time to think, more room to breathe, more margin to make smart decisions instead of panicked ones. It's a cheat code. A boring, dusty, deeply unglamorous cheat code — but a cheat code nonetheless.
And I think I needed about 10 years of being present on the financial markets to actually understand this properly. Ten years. For something this fundamental. Which tells you a lot about how the financial education system fails us — or maybe how the "education" we get is designed to push us toward the flashy instruments, not the useful ones.
Treasury bonds are the least sexy instrument in the world. Which is exactly what makes them the most interesting.
So if you take one thing from this chapter, take this: go read about Treasury bonds. Not because they'll make you rich — they won't — but because understanding them changes the math on every other decision you make. You stop swimming against a phantom current. You start seeing the real one.
And once you see the real one, the whole game looks different.