The focus of 2020

We are two weeks into 2020 and I was wondering, how are you going with your resolutions? It might be the year of vision, but perhaps focus might be a better word as at least on Steem there has been plenty of ideas for the future, not a great deal of concerted effort toward it. Will this be the year?

At a personal level so far, I am on track, as I have picked up some exercise at home and have started to adjust my diet. It isn't my way to go the all or nothing approach as too often, the result is nothing, as I will drive too hard too fast and burn my motivation out. Slow and steady is more my style. It has worked for me most of the time as I am suited to being the workhorse and tend to be pretty patient and persistent, which is probably how my wife ended up with me.

On track to hit your 2020 targets?

Targets can be important for many people for them to create a focus, but there is a risk that while focusing too heavily on one factor, many other opportunities pass by unnoticed, some of which might be more suitable. There is always an opportunity cost of choosing a direction and while it is good to commit to something, it should never be to the point that there is no way to come back, as that can lead to doubling-down on heading the wrong way.

I go the wrong way a lot I think.

There is a project planning technique called a Premortem, where unlike a postmortem that works out what went wrong after death, it tries to predict what could go wrong in the future, It is pretty simple, the idea is to image that the project is already finished and it was an utter failure. Then the goal is to identify why it failed. Generally looking forward for a project, people will be overly optimistic and this is meant to offset the early over-enthusiasm a little. I have used this successfully with clients to help them identify risks for long-term projects.

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New Year's Day 2021 - What went wrong?

For me it is pretty easy to predict what would stop my from missing my self-imposed targets. The answer is me. No one forces me to eat poorly and no one stops me from exercising more. Sure, I can make up excuses and I definitely have limitations that affect much of it, but nothing that really can stop me from improving myself a great deal in these areas.

So, what went wrong is that I didn't do the work required to accomplish the goals. How could I be disappointed in my results if I didn't put in the work? I can really only be disappointed in myself.

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They say the definition of crazy is doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result. Maybe another definition is, not doing things that need to be done in order to achieve a result, but expecting the result anyway. Or is that the definition of entitlement? *I believe I deserve it because I am who I am, so I should get it.

Doing the work guarantees nothing of course, it just opens the opportunity of outcome and depending on action and luck, increases the likelihood. Having two tickets to the prize instead of one, doubles the chance. Depends what the prize is perhaps.

What do you want out of 2020?

Maybe before setting goals for a new year, one should actually spend time thinking about what one wants. It is easy to say health & wealth, but are the other factors in life aligned to support this outcome? If the life lived isn't designed to move us in the right direction toward our goals, it isn't likely we are going to get there.

I noted the other day while talking to a colleague; Why is it that at work I can resist temptation and don't need to feed my sweet tooth, but at home I am near powerless?

For me while I ween myself off sweets, I have to remove them from the home and I have had success with this in the "wealth" category in the past. My wife and I have no catalogs come into our home, and as a result, we spend less. And while I spend a fair amount of time online, I don't frequent places that push products, like news and social media. For the most part, product consumption is much like my news consumption, I rely on others to tell me what is important enough to investigate further.

This can be a risk if one surrounds themselves with idiots - I don't. I like to be the idiot in the room, or at least, be surrounded by people who possess skills and knowledge that I do not have. Part of the reason I like Steem is that it allows for interaction with all kinds of people who are much more knowledgeable and talented than myself, with many of them working toward similar goals as myself.

Decentralized communities are pretty great for accomplishing goals when the stars align and many people have the same goal in mind and the skills and understanding to actually work toward them. Companies are able to achieve large projects by paying people to do the work, but cutting those same people out of most of the benefits. What is part of the awesome potential if Steem is the same can be done by including people in the profit model.

The challenge is that everyone wants a living wage now, before all the work has been done that is able to generate the value in order to pay that wage. Steem has a market cap of less than 50 million dollars, for it to hit 1 billion, Steem needs to increase 20x to $2.60 - that is not much. At that point, the pool value would be 3.3 million, the total STEEM distributed for the year would be 67,000,000 dollars worth.

At that level, do you think you would have a better chance earning more on YouTube?

Unlikely. The biggest problem here is that we all want the results now, in the same way that if I could be healthy instantly, I wouldn't need to have a resolution to exercise more and eat better. We aren't there yet so, things still have to be done.

But, if we can get it to work, get enough people in, people creating, developing and investing, there is essentially no way the centralized companies can compete as they don't have a feeless blockchain, they have a very heavy supply chain that requires constant feeding and a very top heavy management structure. The percentage of income that goes toward content suppliers is miniscule compared to what goes to the operations.

the Steem blockchain allows for free usage of it by providing for witnesses from the pool itself, and then allows for all users to enter in and benefit from their investments at all kinds of levels, whether creating content, voting for curation, investing into STEEM, delegating Resource Credits, supporting projects, building a business or, a combination of some or all of these. Nothing is to stop Steem having YouTube-like companies, nothing is to stop it having pretty much any media delivery business models.

Well, perhaps we might get in the way.

Perhaps we should risk assess ourselves rather than trying to predict the markets for as is said,

the best way to predict the future is to create it.

We are creators - Aren't we?

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]

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To note and bring awareness: 10% of the rewards of this post will go to @sbdpotato as part of the @ocd beneficiaries experiment. The "ocd community" is found under the #hive-174578 tag and you can join through the Beta site, https://beta.steemit.com/trending/hive-174578

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