Involved or Committed?

"It is the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong." -  Tom Stoppard

This is the first quote in the 1997 book "The Sovereign Individual, a recent reread for me. So much of what is discussed in the book has yet to come true and it feels as though the table is set for another run at the sovereignty the authors imagined at the end of Web1.0 with today's fast-paced emergence of Web3. The centralization of Web2.0 via paying for free content with advertising, something Jaron Lanier calls, "the collective deal with the devil," took the vision for the future off the rails for a couple of decades, but those wrongs are being corrected if you believe the top-line story of Web3.

But in the process, the gold rush of ideas, good and bad, are being debated in public opinion at a pace that anyone not working in the industry full time would be hard-pressed to keep up with. And that means that there are going to be some huge winners in the short term that are red herrings for what the actual future will be. The new rich will tell the FOMO-feeling next-comers how they did it and it won't work, or at least not in the same way. There will be disillusion and some will bounce until a later date. Some will dig in and find the next new way to win. They'll share it and then the cycle will repeat itself.

This is what happened for me from 2009 onward in the early days of mobile. At Gowalla, we literally were teaching people that their phones had something called an App store and were talking with Steve Jobs himself about how to get our apps looking awesome for his next keynote debuting an iPhone or iPad. At Waze, October 27th is still known as "Tim Cook Day" because of the way he drove so much interest in our app that we almost doubled our downloads in one week.

The things we didn't have back then in mobile, that I believe we have now in Web3 are the following:

• An awareness of just how big a change we were working in. The FOMO is very real.
• A curated and active forum to share ideas in real-time. Twitter is wild these days.
• New and emerging Venture Capitalists are willing to take true long therm bets that could make or break a career if one of them pays off.
• A market that believes everything just goes up.

Right now is a time unlike anything I've ever seen and I am so incredibly excited to be involved in a number of different projects that I hope to share more about in the near future.  I am learning so much every day and have been having a great time sharing those ideas with friends and other curious minds. But I have to be honest, I am involved, not committed.

Q: Do you know the difference between a chicken and a pig when it comes to your morning breakfast of bacon and eggs?

A: The chicken was involved, the pig was committed.

I have a couple of long-standing ideas that I am working on and think may become a much bigger part of my next few years work when it comes to coaching and investing in the future of the world I want to leave to my kids and their kids, but for now I am very happy to be involved, not committed.

It is a true challenge for me to say that openly. It goes against the 'hustle-ethos' I proclaimed for years of my life.

2020 taught me how to sit still and 2021 taught me to hear my own voice. Those two lessons were only possible because of a global pandemic, but they are lessons I continue to learn and hope to wrestle with here. And I hope you'll join me in the fight to find the right way to build something new amidst a landscape that changes daily and has ravenous players intent on not only finding all the gold mines first but owning the pikes and shovels along the way.

If you are reading this post and not already a "Roomie" - we'd love to include you in our discussions this month. In the same way we tackle Curiosity, we are in the middle of our month-long discussion on Accountability as we speak. Only paid members, or "Roomies" as we've started to call ourselves, have access to the conversations in real-time and are invited to the virtual meet-ups and discussions. You can join just for this next month or you can sign up for the year. Just check out your options here