Building on yesterday

in #thoughts4 years ago

When it comes to skill development, the development comes on the back of previous steps that had to be learned prior to addition. These prerequisites are often in various set orders and often end up in a crawl, walk, run kind of pathway where mastery comes through the development of all necessary primary and most of the secondary and tertiary skills to a high enough level.

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When it comes to development of industries however, a whole range of things need to come into alignment for development, and the foundational levels are the most difficult because that is where the most uncertainty lays and is therefore the riskiest stage to take part in. After there is an adequate foundation however, there are more "trend lines" and therefore direction for the future is easier. On top of this, once there is the foundation of stability to stand upon, then innovation and further risk taking can be entered into on a wider layer, meaning more people can take part and a higher create of diversity in product and experience can be reached.

Of course, there will likely always be some who will be better at it than others and will therefore take larger percentages of whatever resource pools are available. This is no different than when it comes to sporting disciplines and for example, a dominant sprinter like Usain Bolt will take the vast majority of wins, prize money, news articles and sponsorship, even though the number two is literally just a fraction of a second behind.

Competition is one of the driving forces of our innovation practices as with necessity being the mother of invention, we may be hard-wired to feel the need to win, to beat others in some way or at some things. It is likely that this desire to win is why gaming is such a popular and highly subscribed industry because the gamified experience can make a large majority of people feel like they are "winning" at something even though they might not be improving their skillset nor actually getting any gains at all. I have several friends of the past who were so addicted to playing World of Warcraft to the point they lost their marriages and kids.

What I envisage happening is that tokenization is going to not only play on the same processes, it is going to be able to provide actual values to users in a way that their activities of the past were not able to do so. Even gaming will be able to provide some income for users, even if they aren't world class players in tournaments. If you consider how compelling and addictive gaming is today, just imagine it when there is the good possibility that a large percentage of players can get something for their time and "effort" put in.

Apply this to the compounding effects of social interaction, financial revenue streams, immutable bragging rights, verifiable evidence of performance and the ability to roll it all into unique and scarce tokens, and there is a massive chance that what is happening now is going to fundamentally shift the way we use the internet. In so doing, it will change the way we consider value and ownership and therefore, how we demand and what we consider valuable to buy and own.

I predict that going forward, there are going to be increasing issues of addiction to online life blended with revenue streams, in the same way that there are gambling issues among the online poker players, or over-consumption issues for those who do a lot of their shopping online. Having the ability to live and actually earn online can unbalance the other factors of IRL living, and as a result, there is going to be a new range of problems.

However, this isn't going to stop the development of the technologies and if anything, this compulsion factor is going to be one of the largest drivers behind innovation and growth as there is a massive potential to grow a highly profitable business with very little initial outlay. Not only that, the blockchains already have currencies and economics inbuilt into their design. It is not just going to be compelling for the enduser, it is going to be cocaine for the businesses.

Low resource outlay with massive upside potential is what every company wants to hear, and since they don't really have to do much different except intertwine blockchain and tokenization into their experience, they are going to onboard fast. Many already have much of the resources available to them to do so, they just need their dev to do some "gap-fill" in their knowledge and skillset.

What I am hoping though is that through a more direct and transparent global beginning, more of the end users will have more visibility and oppportunity to change their position in the marketplace from mindless consumer to savvy investor, creator and consumer to change what they demand and therefore what gets supplied. I am guessing that the habits run strong in most of us and many will fall into the same rhythms that they have always had.

We can see this on Steem where no matter how the ecosystem has evolved over the last 3+ years, there are people who still approach in the same way with many of them not investing much time and effort into understanding what was, what has or what is changing. Most of us probably take what we know for granted as correct regardless of the environmental feedback we might be getting. Rather than investigate, identify and adjust - we assume we are right and therefore, when we don't get what we want, something or somebody is treating us unfairly.

The other thing we tend to do is compartmentalize components of our argument or cherry pick positions without looking at them in the greater ecosystem and all of the things that are influencing and under the influence of that piece. Disconnecting components is much like cutting off the nose to spite the face as no part is an island and there are always cause and effects for every movement.

However, due to the complexity of life and all the moving parts we handle, we can't take all we know as components into practical consideration and therefore end up creating heuristics we actually live by. It is why most of the arguments online are impotent and will rarely change behaviors because when isolated, there is no connection to all of the other factors involved.

Taking global climate change as an example where people argue about components heavily without considering that many of the factors to reduce pollution (something no one argues about these days it seems) are part of the same ecosystem. They are holding up change toward a cleaner world while the massive conglomerates keep selling what they have always sold without additional cost. Massive profits because, instead of developing, all they need do is optimize.

While people like to argue points, the fact of the world remains that there is too much complexity for anyone to actually know what is best, so while some will act more right than others, no one will have it perfectly aligned. And even if they did have it perfectly aligned today, the changing world would mean they would need to be aware of how the entire global ecosystem has shifted in relation to all of the factors that shift it. Every person, every animal, every change in the breeze.

All we can each do is do better than we did yesterday and those who don't pay attention and adjust with the changing world must be working under the assumption that what they do is right, and will always be right. That is going to be a very difficult position to maintain and keep supporting the more life changes.

In my opinion, whether win or lose or if at the end of the day it is all for nought, living a life that works toward a better tomorrow is always a better life than one that accepts nothing can be done, so why bother. You can spend your entire life blaming your circumstances on others, but they are still YOUR circumstances.

Own them.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]


Onboarding

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The masses can be a little slow on the uptake unless knowledge of these potentials is served up to them in the right way.

Not just the masses, there are quite a number here now who haven't thought much past where we are right now. But, there is only so much space for early adopters and developers of the future.

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