Why I’ve spent the last decade thinking about money. 1/12

Why I’ve spent the last decade thinking about money.

Most people don’t wake up one day and decide to spend a decade thinking deeply about money. For me, it happened slowly — almost like watching a tide come in. At first, barely noticeable and then the realisation; Money touches everything.

It determines where we live, the education our kids can access, how much stress sits quietly in the background of our lives, and how confident we feel about the future. And yet, most of us are never really encouraged to understand what money is. We see what comes in, what goes out — but not the currents underneath. About ten years ago (18 actually, but who's counting), I started asking questions.

• Why does it feel harder each year to get ahead?
• Why do savings seem to slowly lose their strength over time?
• Why do long-term goals like housing feel like it's drifting further away?

These weren’t ideological questions. They weren’t political. They were practical. They came from conversations with friends, colleagues, business owners, and families trying to do the right thing — and still feeling like they were swimming against the tide.

Around the same time, I was building and operating businesses, one a small family business and another in a highly competitive, regulated industry. Very different businesses, but many things in common including how to thrive even with the tide seemingly always against you.

This thinking sent me down a path that I’m still on today and one that introduced me to Bitcoin in 2014, not as a “get rich quick” idea, but as a new digital money that may be able to solve real world problems.

At first, I treated it cautiously, but over time, it's structure kept me engaged and kept me thinking. For the first time, money had new rules and allowed you to opt in to something new, something that followed a known path — even if everything else around it was shifting, an option that allowed you to drift with the tide and not against it.

Over the next six weeks, I want to share a series of reflections (not advice) based on what I’ve seen over the past decade:

• What working in the Bitcoin ecosystem taught me about money and incentives,
• Why cost of living pressures aren’t going away anytime soon,
• How families can think about long-term resilience without radical change,
• Why Lucas Cullen and I built Get Paid In Bitcoin, and what we learned during beta,
• And how we’re thinking about scaling responsibly into the future.

This isn’t about telling anyone what to do with their money. It’s not financial advice. It’s about sharing observations from the real world — from building, listening, and watching patterns emerge over time.

If money, choice, and long-term thinking matter to you, I hope you’ll follow along. Please share this link with families, businesses, individuals who have experienced similar thoughts and maybe understand the 'against the tide' analogy.

First in a series of a dozen discussion articles.

Can also be found on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-7455496383412944896-WzsC?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAcjRtYBrFW4hwiQ4I5TfiqudKutL4tUzP8