Why Boring Investments Beat Wall Street Bullshit Every Time

How my grandfather's Walmart stock, a tool room floor, and quantum computing research taught me that real wealth hides in washers, not Wall Street wet dreams.

Let’s cut the shit—I used to think my grandfather was a financial moron, it was boring investing and that wasn't for me.

As a kid in North Carolina, his house was just Grandpa’s house. Nothing remarkable. But every night we sat in front of the TV, him cursing the NASDAQ like it was a bad ref call—“God damnit!”—while explaining ETFs and the Nikkei index to me between bites of dinner. He was my first teacher, though I didn’t see it then.

I couldn’t resist the flash. Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is good” monologue had me hypnotized. Meanwhile, Grandpa’s investment gospel was laughably simple: “Buy what you use, son.” He’d sit in his La-Z-Boy with Walmart stock certificates spread across the coffee table like tarot cards.

Where’s the sophistication? The derivatives? The hostile takeovers, I thought. Turns out the “rube” made more money off boring investments than most Wall Street guys will ever sniff in three lifetimes. While I was buried in complex financial modeling, convinced I’d cracked some secret code, he was doing the obvious: buying with his wallet. And he was right, but get this so was I.

The twist? You don’t have to pick one philosophy, today we blend both approaches. Grandpa’s blue-collar instincts plus modern complexity—that’s where the real edge lives.

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How Boring Investments Saved My Broke Ass

Fast-forward through an abusive marriage, messy divorce, and Chapter 7 bankruptcy that left me starting over at 35. I'm working as a tool room manager, making injection molds for pulleys—the unsexy components.

Six a.m. to four p.m., Monday through Thursday, surrounded by steel and hydraulic fluid. Nothing humbles your investment philosophy quite like spending your days manufacturing the boring shit that makes everything else possible.

That's when Grandpa's wisdom hit me like a fucking freight train. Not because he was right about buying what you use, but because he understood something my MBA professors glossed over: the real money isn't in the Ferrari—it's in the bolts that hold it together.

The Quantum Rabbit Hole That Changed Everything

These days, when I'm not elbow-deep in injection mold troubleshooting, I'm researching quantum computing with Claude, my AI thinking partner. Not because quantum computers are the next hot thing (though they are), but because I spent months mapping out what infrastructure humanity will need when quantum becomes mainstream.

While retail investors are piling into the obvious quantum computing companies—already overvalued and dominated by institutional money—I'm looking at the supply chain. The specialized materials. The cooling systems. The security protocols. The companies building the boring shit that quantum computers literally cannot exist without.

It's Grandpa's philosophy evolved: don't just invest in what you use now—invest in what humanity will desperately need in five years, and more importantly, invest in the boring investments that make that future possible.

Candles dance. Parts deliver.

What Working in Manufacturing Teaches About Boring Investments

Here's what no business school teaches: the sexiest product in the world is worthless without the mundane parts that make it work. Every Tesla needs washers. Every iPhone needs specialized screws. Every quantum computer needs rare earth alloys most people can't pronounce.

While my former MBA classmates are day-trading meme stocks and chasing whatever Jim Cramer's screaming about, I'm researching which companies make the components that AI infrastructure depends on. Who's manufacturing the server racks? The specialized cooling systems? The rare semiconductors that nobody talks about but everyone needs?

It's not Gordon Gekko glamorous, but it's profitable as hell. And after bankruptcy, I give exactly zero fucks about glamorous.

The New Rules of Boring Investments That Actually Work

Here's what I've learned about making money after swallowing my graduate level accounting pride and embracing the mundane:

Look one layer deeper than everyone else. Everyone sees the electric car revolution—but who's making the charging infrastructure? The battery management systems? The rare earth mining equipment?

Find the bottlenecks. What's the one component that every breakthrough technology depends on? That's where you park your money and wait.

Bet on necessity, not excitement. Exciting companies get bid up by retail FOMO. Boring, necessary companies get ignored until they become indispensable—then they print money. Follow the infrastructure money. Every technological revolution requires massive infrastructure investment. Find the companies building the pipes, not just the pretty interfaces.

Thursday Morning Truth About Boring Investments

So here I sit on Thursday morning at 6am, coffee getting cold while I place market orders before the NYSE opens at 9:30, thinking about Grandpa's coffee table covered in those Walmart certificates. He wasn't some financial genius—he just understood that boring, necessary companies compound wealth while flashy ones provide entertainment and heartbreak.

The money is in the washers, not the machine

The real greed isn't in chasing the next hot IPO. It's in identifying what humanity will need tomorrow and positioning yourself in the boring investments that will provide it. Sometimes that's as unglamorous as the washers holding together the machine that powers the future. Sometimes it's recognizing that while everyone's distracted by AI chatbots, somebody's getting rich making the server farms that run them.

Gordon Gekko can keep his Ferrari and his cocaine. I'll take the company that makes the bolts, collects the dividend, and lets me sleep at night knowing my money's working in the real world, not some Wall Street fantasy.

Ready to stop gambling and start investing in what actually matters? The Gay Men's Field Guide delivers weekly insights from the trenches of entrepreneurship, complete with the failures, breakthroughs, and boring investments that actually build wealth.

You can laugh at boring investments. I’ll take the returns. If you're with me share this post and tag someone who needs to stop chasing shiny objects and start building.

Screw the chip. Ask instead who's cooling it.

Two Roads at Dawn (Spiritual Entrepreneurship)

Nature isn't a judge—it's a laboratory.

I don't use the word "God" much anymore. Not out of defiance—more like accuracy. My approach to spiritual entrepreneurship doesn't feel like a man in the sky making lists. It feels like a system with bark for skin and fog for breath.

The thing that steadies my business decisions has moss in its hair and communicates through morning stillness. It doesn't hand out rules for entrepreneurs; it runs experiments. Light plus water plus time equals life. Decay equals fuel. The forest keeps its own ledger while we panic about quarterly reports.

When I'm practicing spiritual entrepreneurship in nature, the meter of my decision-making syncs to something older and calmer than any business framework. My higher power doesn't promise outcomes—it nudges me toward honest inputs.

Dawn Rituals: The Real Board Meeting

Recently I walked into one of those pivotal moments every entrepreneur recognizes. I'd met a man I wasn't sure about—good company, new chemistry, the kind of beginning that makes you either hopeful or suspicious. Two horizons flickered in front of me, and I needed clarity that no business coach could provide.

This is where dawn rituals for entrepreneurs become essential. At 6 a.m., while the campground still breathed in its sleep, I slipped into the trees with Max—my four-legged business partner who goes everywhere with me. The path was damp and quiet; my breath and the crunch of twigs were the whole soundtrack.

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Then the spiritual entrepreneurship magic happened. The tingle started at the base of my skull—the kind that begins when you're about to receive real guidance. Dawn didn't break so much as lift: darkness unhooked from the branches, and pale warmth gathered low in the east.

Forest therapy for business decisions isn't mystical bullshit. It's practical wisdom. Fog moved through the understory with intention while dew stitched the ferns into wet embroidery. Half of what I felt was physics doing what physics does. The other half was the privilege of being the only witness to natural intelligence at work.

When the sun's first edge shouldered up, its light shattered across suspended droplets and threw a starburst so clean it felt like a bell. In that strike of brightness, I knew the moment would vanish before anyone else woke, and that was the message: authentic entrepreneurship requires choosing your road without flinching.

Lonely, luminous, and undeniably beautiful. My sign finally arrives.

Nature-Based Decision Making vs. Hustle Culture

In that light, two roads rose in my consciousness. Left was a city I recognize ten years from now—the street grid of what happens when we keep building what we're building at Gay Men's Field Guide. Right was softer, blurrier: trying to date in a way that asks my work to quiet down, to be small, to be "just a job" while my heart pounds with entrepreneurial vision.

Here's the brutal arithmetic of spiritual entrepreneurship: being early is thrilling and lonely in the same breath. You see around corners and talk to people about rooms that don't exist yet. You pin paper to the wall and call it a blueprint while everyone else calls it cute.

But nature-based leadership teaches patience. The forest doesn't file quarterly reports, and spreadsheets can't hold the temperature of your chest at dawn. Trees don't apologize for growing toward light. They don't make themselves smaller to fit someone else's garden plan.

Dawn rituals for entrepreneurs create clarity that cuts through relationship drama and business anxiety alike. Standing there with Max tugging at the leash, I heard the forest say: these are the tools of creation. Not "you are chosen," but "you are responsible."

The Authentic Leadership Tax

I've comforted myself by borrowing big names—Da Vinci, Descartes—not because I'm them, but because they knew the ache of being early. Their legacies are mixed and human; sainthood isn't the point. Spiritual entrepreneurship is a stubborn faith in a partial image, and when the edges lock, the click ricochets through your bones.

The man sleeping in our bed wasn't a villain. He didn't ask to be edited into my entrepreneurial map. He didn't ask to hike at my pace. The most loving sentence in authentic entrepreneurship is sometimes the one that ends a fantasy gently.

Forest therapy business decisions don't negotiate. They show structure and leave you alone with your appetite. And appetite is where sobriety lives for me—I got sober February 15, 2015, and the forest has been the one place that consistently hands me clarity without a hangover.

Building Companies That Don't Require You to Be Smaller

We made a call at Gay Men's Field Guide: keep the shirts, keep the blog, keep the welcome mat out. Double down on work that lives ahead of where most folks are comfortable walking. Our future is in the future—it sounds nuts until you call it by its name. it's a spiritual entrepreneurship boundary.

We're not a church; we're a workshop. We don't need converts. We need collaborators and the occasional skeptic who will test a beam and tell us if it holds. LGBTQ+ spiritual business spaces like gay campgrounds are laboratories of belonging—you bring the version of yourself the world said was "too much," and the forest shrugs and makes room.

Everyone I know has stood at a personal trailhead and squinted at two paths. One was safe and legible. One looked like them. The friction is universal: family expectations, rent, grief, the dull ache of wanting to be loved without negotiating away the part that keeps you alive.

Nature-based decision making won't solve it for you—it just removes the static so you can hear your own signal.

Your Dawn Ritual Practice: Getting Started

Want to try spiritual entrepreneurship for yourself? Here's your starter protocol:

Week 1-2: Establish the Practice

• Set alarm for 30 minutes before sunrise

• Find your nearest natural space (even a park works)

• Bring coffee, notebook, no phone

• Walk in silence for 20 minutes

• Sit for 10 minutes, breathe to seven counts

Week 3-4: Deepen the Questions

• Before walking, write one business decision you're facing

• During silence, don't force answers—just listen

• After walking, write whatever comes up

• Notice patterns in your responses

Ongoing: Integration

• Schedule weekly dawn ritual sessions

• Before major decisions, take it to the trees

• Trust the first clear answer that emerges

• Act on forest guidance within 48 hours

The Dawn Challenge

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• I'm not convinced
• I'll tap into nature with you.
• I'm already a believer.
• Sounds like hippie nonsense.

The Work That Feels Like Love

What did I choose? The same thing I always choose when I'm not trying to be someone easier: the work that feels like love. Not the capital-R Relationship (though if someone shows up at my pace with snacks and good shoes, I'll scoot over).

I mean the love that crackles when I'm building, writing, training models, turning thumbnails into portals. Spiritual entrepreneurship is being first at the party with a mop and faith the room will fill. It's knowing I might walk through glass a hundred times to reach the next room and calling the cuts the price of admission.

The forest doesn't hand out diplomas in authentic entrepreneurship. It hands out practice. Tomorrow I'll forget, get anxious, fall in love with a detour shaped like validation. Then I'll go back—maybe with Max tugging at the leash, maybe alone—and start the experiment again.

Nature-based leadership isn't a judge; it's a lab. The spirit of the forest is haunted and beautiful because life is haunted and beautiful. We're here for a moment, and the earth will reuse us generously when we're done.

That fact chills me in the best way. It makes me want to spend my limited hours building a city I can recognize, even if I'm the first one inside, lights half on, music loading. The doors open. If spiritual entrepreneurship is your road too, you'll find it. If it isn't, I hope you find yours and walk it without flinching. Either way, may the fog roll, may the starburst catch, and may the truth be kind enough to arrive early.

—Upton Rand

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