I came back to the office today for the first time in almost two weeks - it is nice to get away from the home office desk and sit at a different desk for a change! Honestly though, the last weeks or months have been pretty intense and I feel like I have so much going on all the time, but not getting anything done. I am getting stuff done, it is just that it seems to be a little bit all over the place, with a little here and a little there.
I feel a bit like a bee moving from flower to flower collecting pollen in order to take it back to the Hive to have it processed into honey. Well, I have said for a long time that the decentralized future is going to require additional income streams to supplement core sources, but I wasn't expecting to have it be the reality quite so fast for me personally. I have always had a few trickles here and there, even before crypto -but it is rapidly becoming a full-time job's worth of time to manage it all.
I am also working full-time as an employee and trying to ramp my workload in my own business back up, after suffering a stroke before summer. It is energy intensive, but also rewarding, as while I do feel all over the place and a little out of sorts, I also feel that what I am doing is meaningful, which is empowering.
This is not a problem per se, it is just that during the changeover period, the processes aren't clean and lean, the habits aren't yet unconsciously competent and the amounts aren't enough to warrant consolidation to lessen the load yet. At some point though, I will have to find other ways to deal with at least some of these aspects, but since at least the crypto stuff is all manual, it means bringing someone into the loop.
I would like to have my wife get more involved, but she isn't the most technically inclined and she also has her own work position, which is getting increasingly demanding on her too. She enjoys it and I wouldn't want to put any pressure on her to do this stuff, so I will continue handling it as best I can, even though it is quite inefficient and I lose effectivity.
But, inefficiency is one of the benefits of a new industry forming, as it means there are opportunities as things slip between the cracks. One of the challenges of decentralized organizations is a difficulty to organize, which also means that there is opportunity for further decentralization as smaller groups form to collaborate and fill the gaps that the larger miss. This spreads value more widely, but also at a lower level, as the mega corps are unable to meet the needs of the marketplace themselves, so will have to bring focus more to their core competencies.
This also means that if their core competence has been to gather organization under their single umbrella to offer scale, they will slowly have to fight in those same markets against more agile organizations that are smaller, faster and built for doing one job very well. This will mean that the centralized decisions will increasingly make mistakes, diluting the power to hold the umbrella over their heads, with more of their parts getting left out in the rain, to dissolve into the competition.
Over time, this will radically reshape the structure of the business environment and while a lot of efficiency will be built into the organization and administration aspects though AI, DAOs and general automation, the solutions to match supply to demand will get quite messy. I believe this will increase opportunity for normal people and small business units to develop for small audiences at local levels again, rather than everyone wanting to use the monolith global organizations. While inconvenient at first, the incentive for users to be staked owners will be too high for many to ignore, meaning that not only will they decentralize their usage, but they will be rewarded economically for doing so.
As I mentioned about the shift to invest into what you consume for a return on your own activity, this makes all users entrepreneurial in nature, which means that the average person will look to add income streams, with the easiest path through taking ownership of their experience as users. This creates a fundamental shift in the way businesses operate and how they approach adoption, creating earthquakes in all industries across the globe. Some will use this opportunity to take a slice of the market, while quite a number of the largest will have their foundations shaken and crumbled to the floor.
This is and should be "scary" for many people, as it will lead to all kinds of market and industry disruption, but from the rubble, new growth businesses and the vacuum in the markets will be filled and there will be a lot of opportunity for those with skills (of pretty much any kind) to be employed in many different ways. Some will have very steady work as many do now, some will be more gig-based, but opportunity is there.
As said, I am struggling to manage everything at the moment as I come to terms with the conditions in my own life, but I also see it as a learning process for what is to come to all of us in the future. I think this is why it is important to learn how to cope with different types of income streams, whether they be active skill based gateways, or more passive streams that require occasional administration work. I do think things will get easier as more tools are created for the new economy, but for now - it is quite hands on.
But there is no lack of flowers to visit, and more are growing by the day.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]