Intro - Why I am very happy to join Steemit!

Hi I´m Jan, @the-traveller,

I had been hearing about the blockchain and how important it is, and I said "sure, sure" ignoring it.
But in Steemit, for the first time, I see something that really blows my mind..
(I heard about it from Jerry Banfield! Thanks Jerry!)

It feels like one of these things Kevin Kelly is talking about ( in his book "the Inevitable")
That creators are going to convert their ideas into value through micropayments by their community.
It's so cool to see that idea being realized and actually have a chance to be a part of it while it is just starting out (relatively speaking). It feels like a chance to be part of the future.

I believe Steem and Steemit is an exponential idea, and joining now is a no-brainer.
My obsession the last 2 years, has been exponential change and how to successfully adapt to it.

This is why I think Steemit is the right community for me, by it's very nature and the point in time,
most of you are "early adopters" and are able to recognize exponential changes and their impact!
Most "normal" people will keep their head firmly in the sand...

Some biography might be in order:
I am Jan, 38, Belgian guy who likes to travel, currently I live in Valencia, Spain with my wife who is Venezuelan .
(by the way: can´t believe I got the nickname @the-traveller ! Probably it´s not a great brand, but am stoked with it!)
And yes, it's spelled right (UK spelling):
traveller (UK) (US traveler)
NOUN
* A person who is traveling or who often travels.
* (British) A Gypsy or other nomadic person.
* (British) A person who holds New Age values and leads an itinerant and unconventional lifestyle.

New Age values maybe don't describe me well but I fully embrace the itinerant and unconventional lifestyle.
Not that of a hippie but of a location independent, digital nomad, working all over the globe and not living the normal conventions, which I believe are fast losing utility.
I enjoy meeting people from all over the world who have that "traveller" mindset.

By training I am an Aeronautical engineer, turned consultant, turned coach.
I have successfully avoided working 9-5 jobs since I left a well paying job in Switzerland in 2010, to travel around in South America with a 30 liter /10kg backpack for over a year.
Afterwards I got paid good money to travel all over the world as a consultant. Now I am a freelance consultant, still working globally (in the last 6 months I was in Greenland, Brazil, Vietnam, Cambodia, South Africa and Belgium and Spain of course)
I discovered it's totally doable to learn languages in 3 months to a good conversational level (I speak Dutch, French, German, English, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese)

Currently, I have already severed the connection between the location where I earn my income (the entire globe) from the location where I currently live and spend my income (Valencia, Spain).

On my to-do list:
Completely separating the link between my time and my earnings.
Become geographically "flexible" moving between Europe and South America
Learn to adapt professionally to new realities, discover new skills I will have to learn to adapt to this future.
Share those new skills with others.

Why adapt ?
Like the move from an agricultural to an industrial economy, most people's source of income is going to change:
During the agricultural era, if you were making a living by selling your muscle power, you found yourself suddenly competing with machines when the industrial era started.
Nowadays many people are making a living from their knowledge and information scarcity.
Guess what? Knowledge and information have become free! (abundant)
What matters now is how can you use knowledge and information to create new ideas.
This is very well explained in the book by Daniel Pink: "A whole new mind.

We will all have to adapt to a huge wave of change. Like the beach, you'll have different options:
a) you can try to stand in front of the wave and resist it
b) you can run away or learn how to swim and duck under it
c) or you can learn to surf and enjoy it

I choose option c)
This is what to makes me so enthusiastic about the Steemian community: I think a lot of them are wannabe surfers!
I'm no expert in all these topics, but then again, nobody else is.
I am curious and want to learn and share the lessons, ideas and new rules of the future idea economy as I discover them.
Finally, I think I have found a community that might want to explore those ideas to discuss and develop them together!

So far, I find on Steemit a more enthusiastic and positive view on the world:
The media in general is designed to make us miserable, not because they are evil, but simply because of market evolution and human psychology. In an attention economy, what gets our brain's attention first is negative news so that's what the media will produce.
I choose to opt out of that because of my health: it is affecting my mental energy.
I choose to consume a more optimistic and constructive diet of news.
Call it the equivalent of clean eating...
I had a hard time so far to find a reliable and constructive source of that kind of content! Because of the recommendation system I hope to find this at Steemit.

Instead of vicious negative news cycles, I believe here I can create for myself (and hopefully others) positive, virtuous feedback loops. Creating enthusiasm, creativity and optimism rather than negative vibes.

That sounds "woo woo", I assure you I am not a "woo woo person".
I am an aeronautical engineer and consultant. I used to be as "left brain" as you could get.
But I came to realize that, to get things done, you need to be able to work with people and find creative solutions.
Those are more "right brain" type functions. Nobody seemed interested to tell me about those in engineering school.

The last few years my experience as a coach I found social and mental tools help to get things done.
The simple fact of the matter is that we have to understand how our brain and that of others works if we want to create an impact in the world.
Unfortunately, our education and business systems seem to be designed to work in spite of how our human mind works rather than optimized to take advantage of what makes ourselves uniquely human.
As a dedicated "left brainer" you are on the list to be either automated, outsourced or become valueless due to abundance. In other words creating a liveable income from those skills is going to become more and more difficult.

This is another reason is why this topic of exponential change seems so important to me.
It's increasingly clear that organizations and individuals that are not using their full human potential, in other words treating people as robots, are going to lose out! Machines, computers and AI are better at doing robot work than humans are.

So my ambition is to help people to escape dull, poorly paid, repetitive, uncreative work, being treated as an expendable resource and replaced and fired instantly if it will save a buck.

Because if you are in that situation, you are definitely going to find either less work, less pay and more stress.
Automation, AI. Outsourcing and Abundance to due to exponential technological change are all trying hard to replace you.
So we all have to adapt, to do something that can't be replaced so easily by the above trends.

That adaptation is not easy, no school or institution is going to teach you how to. Your parents or social peers probably won't understand what is going on yet. However, the playing field is becoming more and more accessible to those willing to learn and adapt. Information and knowledge is free!
Creativity (through Steemit at first but others will follow) will be more and more valued.
The tricky part is taking action, if you are writing on Steemit, you have taken action! Congrats! Now the trick is how to have more impact on the world!

This is why I am so exited to have found Steemit, it is a self selective audience:
if you are reading this, you have already taken a leap of faith and are probably enthusiastic about some of the same topics I am. I hope I can help you discover other exiting ideas and in turn learn about new ideas from this community!

Looking forward to the journey, looks like it will be interesting at least!

My plans for contributions on Steemit
Write (and improve as a writer) about exponential changes,

• how to recognize them and their potential impact on your future life and income
• how to adapt to it (as a professional with College a few years behind)
• how to become an optimist about the future (providing some antidote to all the negative "are you going to lose your job to AI ?" - type articles.
• Write about cool technology that can create technological abundance (and explain that concept while I am at it)
• How to convert all of the above knowledge in personal action, strategies to concretely do stuff that will position you better to surf this wave of change that is coming.

Some side interests on which I'll post as well

• digital nomads, their lifestyle, view of the world, good and bad, life choices
• travel; tips, locations
• complexity thinking, complex systems and what influences them, systems theory

In my writing I also will try to explain the psychological angles, exploring how we humans perceive all of the above, how to deal with change in yourself and surroundings.

Curate: I'll happily upvote following themes:

• discussions about potentially exponential ideas which can change the world
• constructive articles about new paradigms around our social organisation (no doom and gloom, that's too easy, realistic or optimistic will be most appreciated!)
• creative articles about psychology
• digital nomad type articles which bring a fresh viewpoint
• cool tech (and some thoughtful explanation about their future implications) especially "real world" tech like energy, water, food, disease solutions etc. , cool crowd funding stuff.

I have put this intro post to "Power Up 100%" so it would be great feedback and a great launch for me on Steemit, if you could show me with Steem if the above themes are interesting to you. Please let me know in the comments what kind of content you'd like to hear about first!