Accidental Alignment

A pleasant surprise today, as I had a review and it looks like I scraped through for my quarterly bonus levels, which should arrive in November, so that is nice. I worked hard for this one, and I think that what I was working on is valuable for the company, as well as the people I am enabling. Working with Sales people means that when what I do helps, they make more money and I am able to make an impact on the organization.

There have been some positive signs.

I like being able to make an impact.

Some people find this sad, like "working for the man" is a terrible existence. It isn't, though it might depend on what job one does, the company worked for and perhaps the overall direction and purpose. For me, one of the two main reasons I started working for this company was because of the technology they develop, as I see the potential for it to meld into the blockchain world in the near future, even if they don't realize this yet.

The other reason was income security.

Income security is important to me these days, though it is hard to really be "secure" in this world, as it is becoming increasingly volatile. However, there are better and worse actions and I am trying to keep myself on the track of improvement.

This afternoon we had a team meeting and when we have some extra time, we take it in turns to deliver some kind of quick "best practice" for others to learn from. This is useful and a couple weeks ago, one of my colleagues used his round to open up a question as to how to improve his discomfort with learning new things. Where, he feels himself resistant. So today for my turn, I converted one of my old language training vocabulary exercises into a reflection exercise instead, because as we talked it through, the biggest hurdle to personal growth, is ourselves. Reflecting on the topic, how we feel about it and how we associate around it, allows us to uncover opportunities. I might give the template for the reflection session in another article some time.

However, what the small group quickly realized was not only are they more resistant to some things than they expected themselves to be, they also didn't have a good understanding between where they are and where they want to be. Using the exercise helped them build a type of task list of actions, which put together would help them reach their goal, but even independently would at least move the needle toward it and give benefits, even if they didn't make it all the way.

Life is very much like doing a jigsaw puzzle, except the pieces are from multiple sets and all jumbled together. To begin with, it is going to be very difficult but, once there is a clear picture of what the end goal is going to be like on the cover of the box, it is a matter of sorting through the pieces by color, shape and likelihood, whilst excluding the ones that are obviously not part of the final image. Frustrating to begin with, but as pieces start coming together and experience of what fits where becomes habitual, the process speeds up. However, if we don't have an idea of the end goal, we are just taking random pieces and likely getting nowhere fast.

Each of us have a spectrum of options in our life at all times and each decision will lead to an action that will move us in one particular direction over another. If our decisions are random, we are going to move in random directions, but we rarely do this. Instead, we tend to make decisions based on rules, such as which is the cheapest, the most convenient, the least painful, the best looking etc. This means that we are choosing a path, but not necessarily tempered by the guidelines of where we want to be. And, even if we know where we want to be, if we aren't performing the right actions that will get us there, we aren't going to get there, because the direction is opposed to the outcome.

This is why I like what I do for work, because it gives me a chance to see the future position and then investigate, build programs and enable processes to change behaviors that will help move toward that goal. It isn't a clean or fast process most of the time, and there is a lot of trial and error, but there is a way forward and I get to lay some of the pavers - put together some of the puzzle pieces.

And, going back to why I chose to work for this company, I see that the technology they are building is coming to a point where it is going to fit into the blockchain industry and might be a key piece for some companies in their model for their web 3 interactions. There is a convergence of other technologies that are vastly different, but are coming together to build the new digital economy and I think that many of them are still too narrow to see the bigger picture and where they sit within that framework.

I predict that in the next decade, a lot of companies are going to pivot their products a they realize that there is an opportunity to build in ways that they hadn't recognized earlier, because no one was looking. There are far fewer visionaries in companies than there might seem, and most of those who do have the vision, tend to be narrow in their focus because that is what pays their bills, that is their business. And when you are making good money doing your current business, it is hard to see how that might not be valuable in the future and it might be something completely different.

However, it is like sorting through that puzzle and getting halfway through the picture, and then realizing that the picture you want to build is actually made from the pieces you excluded as not the image earlier. However, there they are, neatly piled up, grouped together and waiting, so half the challenge of building the puzzle is already solved, it just needs intentional work performed to complete it. And, this is how I see a lot of the crypto and blockchain industry now, where we have a lot of puzzle pieces, but we haven't yet arranged them in a way that most people can look at them and say,

Hey, I know where that is headed!

For now, we don't have to be at the completed picture, we are still sorting through the pieces and seeing what we have and what is missing. There are a lot of gaps, but bit by bit, we are assembling components that resemble something, even though it is unclear exactly how it fits into the overall picture.

While a lot of people have a romantic view that the blockchain industry is going to be built buy fringe people doing what they love, mainstreaming is going to take development by businesses with dedicated teams looking to generate their revenue from blockchained business models. It is going to be more than gaming, more than content and entertainment, it is going to include business to business models that most people will never have any contact with at all, because they aren't aimed at the consumer.

For now, it is risky to make a full move into blockchain development, but there are companies out there that are making first moves toward it, even if they don't realize where they are actually headed. This is the same with governments, who are making their decisions seemingly on an end picture that all the puzzle pieces in the world, aren't going to be able to build. They think it is one thing, but it is a different animal completely.

By the time they recognize what has happened, it will be too late.

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]