Timothy Schucker, 18, turned $100k in savings into $58,000 in one day trading Tesla call options on Robinhood in July 2020. He'd already made $30k monthly from e-commerce, but the quick win led him to gamble further, briefly hitting $350k before taxes and losses caught up. He now says building skills and businesses beats chasing speculative gains.
Questions this video answers
July 8, 2020
$58,000
About $100,000
About $30,000 per month
Made $3,000 one day, then a few days later lost $10,000
Chapters
On July 8, 2020, I made $58,000 in one single day. And it was the worst thing that ever happened to me and set me back for years. Let me explain for some context. When I was 18, I had left high school to run a landscaping lawn care business, built an e commerce store that was making me about 30k per month and had about 100 grand stash away. I'm not saying that to bribe. That's just what where I was at at 18. Over the previous years leading up to that point, I had gone on my entrepreneurial journey, if you want to call it that. I had tried E Commerce a bunch of times, done a bunch of different things. I did lawn care, landscaping, driveway shoveling, sneaker clubbing. Actually also had worked at a Greek restaurant as a waiter. Whatever you, you know, anything that you can think of, I probably tried it at that point. But all of the money that I made from all those different ventures I set aside and put into like a Roth ira. I was basically the cheapest bastard you've ever met. I tried to save every single dollar and I wouldn't even go out and buy a dollar. So over the course of this period of time, I was able to build some pretty decent, like foundational skills for an entrepreneur. And I had slowly built up a few businesses that were making me really solid money for a teenager. So at this point in July, I had had the E commerce business since like January of 2020. It was starting to slow down in July because somebody had reported our Facebook page and it got taken down and the ad accounts were rejected and I couldn't run any ads. So during this period of time, while the e comm business was kind of like slowing, I started dabbling and watching some YouTube videos about stock trading. So I started dabbling a little bit, you know, dipping my toes in the water, if you want to call it that, and made $3,000 one day. A few days later I lost ten grand. I did this for a few weeks even after losing ten grand. I don't know why, but I guess I just wanted to make the money back. Did it for a few weeks, you know, was trying it around and like watching some videos, doing some stuff. And one day I decided to put $100,000 into a Tesla call option. I actually did that two times in one day. Crazy. And overall between those two trades, I got really, really lucky. Tesla was going up and I made netted $58,000 as an 18 year old on his iPhone. Now here's why, believe it or not, that was Actually one of the worst things that could have happened to me financially. You see, after the 58k day, over the course of the next two months, I basically, you can call it gambling because it was just stock, stock options trading. Gambled my way from the 100k that I had from the ecom store and investing all the, the money that came in from that to 350k. Now you may be asking, how on earth could that have been one of the worst things that ever happened to you? Well, if you rewind and look at what I was doing before, I was actually on a better path. I was learning all the right lessons. I was making small incremental improvements and building on top of my skill. And I was learning to stick with one thing over time. However, I learned the wrong lesson from tripling my net worth within the span of two months. It taught me the wrong lesson. Money basically started to lose its meaning. And I don't mean that like, you know, some fugazi stuff or whatever, like not spiritual, like oh, money losses. Not that like literally a thousand dollars in a day stopped seeming like a lot. Because when you get, this is like I get, I think it's probably a similar thing that happens to lottery winners is you get all this money at once and it's like, oh, that was easy. And so you don't really have as deep of an emotional attachment to it. And now why would I go out and work for, for $50 an hour, $100 an hour, which is a really good rate when I can press a button on my phone and make 58k, so it taught me to do easy work, to try to get a massive gain in a short period of time as opposed to continuing on the path that I was before, which was just slow and steady grind, but ultimately would have gotten me further. Basically what I was doing is I was trying to hit half court buzzer beaters instead of taking layups. And again, up until that point, it was the slow and small incremental investments that I was making. It was putting money back into the business. It was focusing so hard on one thing. And then all of a sudden when all the money came, I learned that I needed to just look for the massive jump going from like zero to a million because all of this money had come in so quick that I thought that that was now the new normal. Funny story, since then, since like that period of time, my net worth has kind of like plateaued and gone down a little bit. Taxes took a massive chunk. So that 350k that was pre tax, a lot of that was capital gains. But my net worth has not reached the same level since then. In the next few months, it's going to go up by quite a bit. I have some cool stuff in the works with the company that I run now, but kind of besides the point because it did set me back for years. So 2020, it's now 2023. I think part of. Personally, I would have been further along, net worth wise if I had stayed on the path that I was on before. However, the title is a little misleading because I don't think it was actually the worst thing that happened to me because ultimately the events that led me to where I am now would not have happened if I hadn't had that day. And so even though I've maybe like been a little bit slower and not as far along as I would have been had I kept on the same path, I think now I actually have a better opportunity to reach a higher net worth than what I had before. So with that being said, your takeaways, you know, whether you want to take them away or not, my recommendation is not to mess around with like stock trading or Forex trading, or spending a ton of time, like trying to find the next crypto. And instead, if you invest that time, focus and energy into developing a real skill, your trajectory might not be like this, which is what happened to me. It'll be more like this. But the guy who goes like right here usually stops and the other one keeps going. Yeah. So point being, don't go for the quantum leaps. Focus on the small incremental steps. Like Hormozi says, do the boring work and stack a skill over time, because eventually that is what's going to pay you the most. Not identifying the top stock of crypto or gambling on Robinhood on call options. I've done it all. I've done the crypto things. I've done everything. There's nothing that's been more valuable to me than building a skill and building a business. So don't go for the shiny object syndrome. Focus on what you're doing, and if you're not in the right business, try a few different things. If you're young, it's okay to kind of bounce around, try different things, but don't focus on making massive leaps in your net worth, especially when you're younger. Focus on building the skill and building the core. So that is my takeaway for you guys. Thank you guys so much for watching this video. If you got value from it, be sure to leave a like and a comment letting me know what you learned or what you would like to see next. So without any further ado, I will see you guys in the next one. Peace.
