My honest thoughts:

I’ve made a 7-figure PnL five times ever and in all five times, it came from coins I held through serious volatility.
And all five times, I was underwater at some point.
That has probably been the most important lesson of my trading career: nothing life-changing comes easy. If it were easy, everyone would be at 7 figs. It takes a ridiculous amount of conviciton and delusion to hold something through volatility up until 7 figures. Prior now, i didn't have the balls to hold through the volatility and just threw my conviciton plays in an untouchable wallet so im not tempted to sell but right now i am more experienced and i think social trading has made it better.
You do not need to beat the market every day. You do not need to predict every candle nor be in every dailyt runner. Scalping is fine if that is your edge but the truly asymmetric outcomes usually come from identifying something early, sizing conviction appropriately, and surviving the volatility long enough for the thesis to play out without paying attention to the charts.

These are the five biggest lessons I have learnt from those seven-figure trades.
1. Violent moves happen when enough people simply refuse to sell.
For that to happen, a community usually needs something bigger than a chart. It needs a mission.
And ideally, that mission should be sufficiently delusional.
SPX6900 talks about flipping the stock market. Do I think that literally happens? Probably not. But the goal itself creates identity, belief and something for holders to anchor to.
$CATE wants to flip DOGE.
$BATON is trying to become a meaningful percentage of $PUMP’s market cap while the broader PUMP thesis itself is that it eventually flips Hyperliquid to become the most valuable company in Web3.
Whether these goals ultimately happen is almost secondary but the point is that great meme communities need a destination and without one, everyone eventually becomes a seller.

2. Conviction needs catalysts.
Delusion alone is not enough, there still needs to be a sequence of events capable of continually renewing attention and giving rational holders reasons to remain in the trade.
That is one reason BATON interests me. It is still early in the custom-pair experiment and has barely scratched the surface of listings and distribution etc
Most importantly, it is yet to experience a full PUMP repricing to Hyperliquid level at the minimum.
PUMP currently generates greater revenue than Hyperliquid while trading at 1/10th of its valuation. That screams undervalued so for BATON, there are still several obvious milestones ahead.

The three milestones I am watching most closely are:
PUMP reclaiming ATH.
PUMP killing another zero.
PUMP eventually challenging Hyperliquid for the highest MC posiiton in the whole of Web3.
If the relationship between PUMP and BATON is real, those are the moments where the thesis should become increasingly visible.

3. Know who you are holding with.
This lesson cost me a lot of money. Who you choose to go to battle with matters enormously to me
In the past, I would accumulate 1–2% of a token and spend all my time thinking about my position while paying almost no attention to who controlled a meaningful part of the other 98%.
That was a grave mistake.
A great thesis means very little if your buying simply becomes exit liquidity for farmers.
Now I care deeply about holder composition.
With both $BATON and $CATE, I can identify a meaningful percentage of supply held by people I understand reasonably well. I can tell you who holds what up to 20% for each. These are people i know and understand how they trade and think. More importantly, these are people genuinely committed to seeing the thesis through