I was feeling heat in the middle of the night, so I decided to go out and take some fresh air.
I carried my phone with me and started scrolling through X.
I wasn't really looking for anything serious. I was just outside, trying to clear my head and get some fresh air while scrolling through my phone.
Then I saw an advert.
Normally, I would have skipped it like every other advert.
Most times when I see adverts on X, I don't even bother reading them. I just scroll past them and continue with whatever I was doing.
But this one made me stop scrolling.
It was a memecoin advert.
The name was ANSEM.
Honestly, I hated memecoins.
I didn't like them.
I always looked at memecoins as something too risky. The way people were jumping into different coins because they were trending never really made sense to me.
One minute everybody would be shouting about a particular coin.
The next minute, nobody would even remember it existed.
So when I saw ANSEM, my first thought was basically, "Another memecoin."
But there was something different about this one.
The person who made the advert was a guy with over 1 million followers on X, and surprisingly, he had the same name as the coin.
ANSEM.
That was actually what made me pay attention to the advert.
I looked at it for a while.
I saw the coin.
I saw people talking about it.
I checked the marketcap.
It was around $5 million.
$5 million.
Looking back now, that number still makes me shake my head.
Because I had the opportunity to enter at that point.
I could have bought a small amount.
I didn't even need to put in a crazy amount of money.
But I didn't.
I just tried to ignore it and move on.
I told myself I wasn't interested in memecoins.
I continued scrolling and eventually forgot about it.
Or at least, I thought I forgot about it.
The next morning, I came back on X.
And the first thing I started seeing everywhere was ANSEM.
ANSEM was trending.
People were talking about it.
People were buying it.
People were posting their entries.
People were posting their profits.
The whole thing had suddenly changed.
I checked the marketcap again.
This thing had moved from around $5 million when I saw it to about $100 million.
I just looked at my phone.
I couldn't shout enough.
My mind immediately went back to the advert I saw the previous day.
The same advert I had scrolled past.
The same coin.
The same ANSEM.
But this time, it was no longer sitting around $5 million.
It was around $100 million.
I started asking myself questions.
Why didn't I ape in?
Why did I ignore it?
Why didn't I just put something small?
Why did I allow my dislike for memecoins to make me completely ignore what was right in front of me?
That was the part that really hurt.
It wasn't like I heard about ANSEM after it had already pumped.
I didn't discover it at $100 million.
I saw it when it was around $5 million.
I had already seen the opportunity before everybody started talking about it.
But I didn't act.
And that's what kept disturbing me.
I kept thinking about how much money I could have made.
I started doing the calculations in my head.
"What if I had entered with this amount?"
"What if I had entered with that amount?"
"What if I had just taken a small risk?"
The calculations were painful.
And the more I calculated, the worse I felt.
Of course, nobody knows what would have happened if I had actually bought.
Maybe I would have sold too early.
Maybe the coin would have crashed after I bought.
Maybe I would have lost money.
But at that moment, I wasn't thinking about all those possibilities.
All I could think about was the fact that I had seen it and ignored it.
That was what broke me.
It wasn't a financial loss.
I didn't lose any money.
I lost an opportunity.
And sometimes, missing an opportunity can mess with your head badly.
For almost two weeks, I stopped coming online.
I just needed to stay away from X.
I needed to recover.
Not from losing money.
But from thinking about the money I could have made.
Every time I came online, I felt like I would see ANSEM again.
Someone would post about it.
Someone would post their profit.
Someone would talk about how early they entered.
And I would remember that I had actually seen the advert before all of them.
That feeling was terrible.
I kept asking myself why I didn't just take a chance.
But eventually, I had to accept something.
The opportunity was gone.
There was nothing I could do to bring back that entry at $5 million.
No amount of regret was going to change the chart.
No amount of calculations was going to give me the profit I imagined.
The money was never mine in the first place.
It was just an opportunity I saw and didn't take.
And that experience taught me something I will never forget.
Sometimes, an opportunity doesn't come looking like an opportunity.
Sometimes, it comes as an advert you are about to scroll past.
Sometimes, it comes as something you don't understand.
Sometimes, it comes in a form you already have a bias against.
And sometimes, by the time you finally realize what you saw, everybody else is already inside.
I'm not saying people should blindly ape into every memecoin they see.
That's not the lesson.
The lesson for me was that I needed to stop dismissing things simply because I didn't like the category they belonged to.
I needed to pay attention.
I needed to do my own research.
And most importantly, I needed to understand that opportunities will always come.
I missed ANSEM.
It hurt.
It really hurt.
But I couldn't stay away forever.
Because if I kept dwelling on the one opportunity I missed, I might end up missing the next one too.
So I came back online.
And this time, I decided I would pay more attention.
Because the next opportunity might not announce itself loudly.
It might just be another advert appearing on my screen while I'm scrolling.
And I don't want to scroll past it again.
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