On the day I'm writing this, there are 8053 different cryptocurrencies on the "Coin Market Cap".

We all know that at least one or two of those 8000 coins will explode 1000x. Many gem hunters will make their life objective to find that coin and become rich by investing only a small sum of money.
There's nothing wrong with that. Even I'm one of those people trying to find the right micro-cap coin to invest in while its price is under 1 cent.
The problem with hidden gems is that there are vast amounts of scam coins with fancy websites and wild roadmaps. It's hard to distinguish which projects are truly committed to achieving what they wrote in their roadmap from those who use some fancy techy keywords to bait us.

When entering the market, noobies tend to be instant maximalists or instant gem hunters. Most don't take their time to learn about the technology or to find a mentor. If they do find a mentor, this poor mentor will be rejected pretty soon as he won't guess the right price movements.
They are easy prey for scammers trying to sell them worthless coins.

Now comes the moment when noobies come back to their mentors bowing their heads and asking for guidance.

There is no right answer when asking which coin to invest in. If you missed the chance to buy BTC low, and still expect to see 100x gains, you'll need an altcoin.
For example, I made much more money buying LINK at $0.30 than buying BTC at $4k.

So what to focus on?
My answer is: "FATHER COINS".

The cryptocurrency and blockchain industry is constantly growing. It's a very time-consuming quest to follow every new project that keeps being added almost every day.
Just reading and filtering news is a two-man job.

But what are Father coins?
Father coins are all the coins that made a radical innovation in the industry. The majority of them have built a completely new type of blockchain, while others found a way to build useful solutions on top of a known blockchain.
Some of the coins worth mentioning as the "fathers" are:

Bitcoin
It's actually the grandfather. If it wasn't for Satoshi's Bitcoin, other coins would probably never exist.

Litecoin
The father of altcoins. Mr. Lee understood that Bitcoin's open-source code can be used for building other blockchains and coins. With a few modifications like a different total cap, block time, and mining algorithm he made the first altcoin.

Ethereum
The father of dapps and smart contracts. Vitalik found a way of building applications on top of the blockchain.

Dash
The father of masternodes. Satoshi understood that even if the Bitcoin community is strong and motivated, it's naive to expect that people will share their infrastructure to maintain a node in the network for free. Dash invented masternodes as a solution to that problem. Besides solving the volunteer nodes problem, masternodes added several features that make a blockchain better, like more security, faster transaction speed, and optional privacy.

Bytecoin
Bytecoin is proof that not all fathers are good parents. Still, we have to be thankful for giving us a child called Monero.
He's the father of privacy coins.

Chainlink
The father of decentralized oracles. Even if it's built on top of Ethereum, it doesn't make him less valuable since it invented a way to check and trigger smart contracts in a decentralized way.

Filecoin
The father of decentralized cloud. They even invented a way that enables everyone with free disk space to share it and be rewarded for participating in the network.

There are other coins worth mentioning as some made important innovations in the crypto space, but let's keep it simple.
Study the father coins, and you will get a clearer picture of what others are trying to do.
It will be much easier to identify copycats and scams. It will also help you understand better other coins and projects.

Thank you Satoshi!