For me, having a purpose has always been an important part of everything that I have done. I joined BanklessDAO because I liked the Bankless mission: creating a world where every human on the planet can freely and collaboratively benefit from open finance.

I figured that through BanklessDAO and the DAOs mission: to help the world go Bankless by creating user-friendly onramps for people to discover decentralized financial technologies through education, media, and culture.

I started contributing in areas like The Project Management Guild, Tokenomics, the Grants Committee, and Crypto Sapiens and Governator. I found what I thought was my purpose through my contributions.

As months went by, I found that I was doing more and more, putting in more time than was healthy for anyone. But I felt like I had no choice, for a few reasons. The first being that I feel it’s a waste of time to do something if I am not going to do it ‘ myself but right, the second was that cutting down meant less of the token I received, and the third, was that I didn’t want to let anyone down.

So for the last six months, I have spent every free minute of every waking hour doing something DAO related.

This of course affected my home life, as that meant the amount of time I spent with my family decreased.

Now, I have never considered myself naive. In fact, I consider myself quite the contrary. I have always had a really good bullshit meter, am hypersensitive to my surroundings, can almost see things before they happen, and can decipher meaning from anything.

But somehow along the way, my judgment became fuzzy or blurry. I fell into this trap of wanting to produce valuable content for others when it wasn’t a two-way street. What I was getting in return was next to valueless. A couple of thank you’s and recognition of work (for others to actually use) aren’t that valuable for me.

For months now, I have been struggling to understand my purpose within BanklessDao. Over this time, I realized a few things, after remembering something important that I was taught:

Its not about me. I am not that special.

I recently applied for a job. While updating my resume, I realized something.

All of the experience and every single skill needed for this job, I learned at BanklessDAO.

It really hit me the other day, when I was talking to a parent another parent. His son is getting ready to leave for college, to study Information Technology. The school was pretty far away, but his son chose to go there because that’s where his girlfriend was going. He started telling me the classes his son has to take, and of course the ginormous amount of money it was costing him and his wife. He continued to tell me that he had to take out a second mortgage on his house in order to pay for it, his facial expression started to change, his smile changed to more of a grimace.

I instantly thought of my parents and my college experience(s). As I mentioned in my first post, I went to college because that is what I was supposed to do. The first University that I went to, I left after a month. It was in the City, having grown up in a smaller somewhat rural town, it wasn’t for me. I couldn’t even sleep- I can sleep through crickets chirping, but sounds of alarms, sirens, cars, busses and bottles smashing on the sides of buildings, I could not.

So, I went home, enrolled at the local Community College, took Business and Finance classes and the requirements that I would need to transfer to another University. I stayed there for four years, and took enough classes to collectively probably get three different degrees.

But, I was still not happy. Eventually, I went to nursing school, graduated and became a nurse. I am still not exactly sure why, other than that’s what everyone else was doing, the pay was good and I knew my parents would be happy, (shit they had already invested well over $100,000 into my education and I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Keep in mind this was about 20 years ago, so with the cost of education today, it would be double that, triple even.)

Despite all of that, 20 years later, there I was still not happy. Still trying to find myself, what I do best and what makes me happy.

It pained me to listen this man go on about the amount of debt he was now in and how many more years he would have to push back his retirement and work to payoff his son’s tuition.

Needless to say, it pained me even more to think of the debt I put my parents in while I was in school - and that it was all for nothing.

Then I thought about my experience at BanklessDAO. In less than a year, and for a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the cost, I learned more than I had learned in almost a decade of College classes.

I listened to this poor man go on for a while, he really seemed beaten up by what he once thought would be his golden years, filled with traveling throughout Europe and Greece now shattered by the thoughts of second mortgages and personal loans.

At the end of the conversation, I simply said,

You must be so proud of your son. If he ever comes home or decides that this College isn’t for him, let me know. There is this phenomenal, affordable online program that he will love - and so will you.

Perhaps, in my search for purpose, I had been thinking of it all wrong. You see, it was not my purpose within the DAO I was really looking for, but it was the purpose OF the DAO.