Someone, somewhere, at some point, said that ideas are the intersection of people and places. In other words, ideas happen everywhere, all at once. Ideas are not born out of grand plans. Great ideas are born when two minds collide. When people have genuine connections, without agendas, without competition. Ideas are born through collaboration.
Many people have it backwards and think that they have to work hard, try harder, push harder. They want to find a playbook for how to succeed. And there is no shortage of playbooks. Tons. Just check your local bookstore, or Twitter, or the Internet. People desperately want for someone to tell them how to live their life, what the guideposts are, and what milestones they need to hit to get from Point A to Point B to Point C.
I was one of these people. I’m no different from most. I just also happened to get involved with a whole new way of approaching life and work. There are many words for this style, lots of lingo, that I don’t think is useful or helpful, so I won’t write it. I’ll just say, blockchain. I’ll continue using the word blockchain for the remainder of this post. You get the jist.
Blockchain is, for many, an alien life form. When I published a nonfiction story about MetaCartel, one of the earliest blockchain communities, friends told me they couldn’t tell what was fiction and what was nonfiction. It’s all nonfiction, friends.
We’re programmed by the media, the news, and big mainstream companies, like Coinbase, to think that blockchain is just investing. Or that it’s buying NFTs. Wanna get rich? Wanna gamble? Buy some crypto. That’s basically the Coinbase motto. It’s the motto of all mainstream exchanges. These exchanges have helped onboard a lot of people into crypto, but they’re not helping people understand the mindset of blockchain. Sure, you can buy some crypto on Coinbase, maybe get lucky and rich, buy some fancy cars and a house, but then what??…you still won’t be happy.
Most people spend their entire life looking for community and never find it.
Blockchain is a social movement. It will be as impactful as the Civil Rights Movement or as Abortion Rights. Blockchain is cooperative, positive sum collaboration games. It is the most heady, philosophical, technically challenging, trippy thing that you can be a part of in 2022. Blockchain is how you meet brilliant, impact oriented people, who want to make real change, who put people over profit. Who also want to teach and show you and don’t care what your background or work experience is, because that’s the definition of diversity and inclusion: everyone has something to offer if you just give them a chance and are kind and compassionate while they learn. Give them permission to surprise you.
2+ days of the week, I hear my husband on video calls talking to his team with anger and frustration in his voice. He’s a Product Manager at a tech company. He’s frustrated that things aren’t working, things aren’t moving, turn-around is slow.
It sucks. I was in his shoes once so I empathize.
Traditional companies suck. They are sloooow. There is so much red tape and bureaucracy and saving face. So much politicking. Not enough time to do meaningful work.
Blockchain has its fair share of problems, too. The most obvious is NFT millionaire ape pricks. The overnight successes. The people who gamed the system, created some pixelated image and sold it to their massive audience. I actually tried doing something like that with a NFT that I minted from the last blockchain story that I wrote. It’s super easy to create a NFT, and people who earn millions doing it, give the space a bad rap. I don’t have a large audience and I’m not a celebrity, so I just earned a measly couple of hundred dollars. Oh well, it’s a good thing. My head has remained small as a result.
Bored ape token gated communities with exclusionary memberships are toxic for the blockchain space. Trying to make blockchain mainstream is toxic too. We don’t need more investors. We need more people who understand the blockchain mindset.
What is the blockchain mindset?
It’s positive-sum games. It’s using technology to create economies that reward people in equitable ways. It’s not recreating the politicking bureaucracies of traditional companies.
Work in blockchain moves fast because people value relationships. People are quick to give you feedback and quick to raise and support you if you show genuine interest and deliver value. People don’t spend time perfecting their communication or their deliverables, in case their boss will not be happy with what they write, or how they write, or maybe their client will talk behind their back and they’ll get fired or cancelled or demoted or whatever else happens in traditional companies when you’re not fully in sync with the politics. Politicking is a full time job.
The prestige of big publishing companies is degrading. More writers are moving to Substack. More decentralized publishing platforms are being built. No one wants to deal with the slow bureaucracy and the power games of traditional media companies.
Information moves fast in 2022.
So stop polishing your work and just put it out into the world. You need to get feedback.
The days of independent, solo genius hermit working by his/herself are evaporating. Collaboration is the name of the game. As someone once said, great ideas are the intersection of people and places. Information needs to move fast for more collisions to happen.
Blockchain is eating the world.