Looking back at the last 12 months, I have the impression it was the craziest year ever. But then again this could just be my recency bias.

Things do get crazier and crazier at every turn of the calendar and maybe we just started another year which will reveal its craziness in even more amplified ways. Who knows. We will find out.

2022 was an exciting time: reading through my notes over the last few days I can safely say the positive moments vastly outweighed the bad ones. I formed memories that I'm confident will stay with me forever.

I had plenty of fun: together with a small group of passionate and smart people I found myself launching Bankless Consulting.

You can read the full post here: https://www.mc10.xyz/the-4-good-things-about-building-a-crypto-firm-in-a-bear-market/

As 2022 quickly comes to an end, it is time for reflection.

Many things happened this year. Some exciting stuff, some really exciting stuff and a few sad moments.

Looking at what's coming next in my life (hint: the best!), I spent a few minutes thinking through eleven personality traits I would like to develop in the decade ahead.

This is going to be a short personal post.

No crypto, no business, nothing more than me reflecting upon areas of my character that I want to strengthen, regardless of how good I feel about them now.

MC10’s eleven

I came up with eleven areas of my persona I want to further analyze and develop over the next 10 years.

It was an interesting exercise. It took me a few minutes and I probably learned something. I recommend you do it for yourself too.

These are my eleven.

1. Curiosity: I have always been a curious kid. In a way, I'm lucky that curiosity comes natural to me. When something piques my interest, I feel compelled to learn more about it.

   I’m not afraid to ask questions, sometimes too many, and go into experiments that make no sense, just to satisfy my curiosity.

   As we enter the new year, I want to keep the fire on: stay curious, never dampen the will to learn, go deep into weird interests, read and reflect on subjects and people that get my attention in a way I just can’t ignore.

2. Patience: I'm quite bad at this. Instinctively, I’m impatient: I have low tolerance for mistakes, either my own or others’. I do not easily accept the fact that things might take time to get done and I want everything ready here and now.

   Admittedly, with time I got better at patience, especially since I became a parent. The experience of raising a child teaches patience like nothing else in this world.

   I value patience because it helps.

   In his “Captivi”, Roman playwright Plautus writes: Patience is the best remedy for every sorrow. And in the next 10 years I want to find strategies and tactics to improve at it.

   

3. Commitment: I am decent at committing to projects and people, but what happens at times is that I commit to too many projects and too many people. Over-committing means that I do a sub-optimal job (sometimes, bad!) at handling the tasks I own or devoting energy to the people I care about. My time and energy are finite, after all.

   This is a hard lesson for me to learn: I want to improve my ability to commit to the right things and the right people, avoiding distractions that do not help me to progress.

4. Presence: another difficult one for me. Even this f***in’ post talks about stuff that should happen within the next 10 years. I do not enjoy thinking about the present much. Because I know I benefit from establishing a connection with the present, sometimes I force myself to gratitude. This helps, but it’s not really a habit of mine.

   I am constantly projected into the future: my mind doesn’t stop thinking of new ideas, improvements, the next projects. When I accomplish a goal, I am quick at ticking it off and coming up with the next one. This is both a blessing, and a curse. It keeps me alive, but it also gives me a sense of anxiety for what's yet to be accomplished, which is inevitably a lot.

5. Focus: in my university days, I could study any complex subject without getting distracted for hours straight. My attention span was high, I could focus easily at will.

   Now, many years later, my ability to focus for a long uninterrupted time is not as good as it was, and I blame the internet for that! My life is full of things that compete for my attention, especially (but not just) in the digital world. This makes it hard for me to keep concentration elevated for a sustained period. Meditating and reading books (ie, forced meditation) has helped me deal with this challenge. I'm still not as good as I used to be, but I'm improving.

6. Self-sovereignty: it doesn’t just work for your money, but your persona too. Self-sovereignty indicates the ability to choose the direction of your life, and being the exclusive authority over your body and mind. We get pulled into all sort of things: follow this or that trend, submit to this or that government, subscribe to this or that service, listen to this or that leader. It's time to elevate ourselves so we can be helpful to others. It sounds counterintuitive, but you cannot be helpful to society at large if, first, you are not helpful to the guy next to you. And you cannot be helpful to the guy next to you if you cannot help yourself. Self-sovereignty means regaining control, so that you are able to do bigger and better things for you and others.

7. Competence: whatever your field(s) of choice, you can never reach a level where there's nothing more to learn. It's important to keep curiosity alive (see point #1) and become a master at learning new things. Perfecting your craft is essential. Learning about learning is the single most valuable skill we could teach ourselves. Kids today will have to nail it, because who will not be able to keep the pace of progress will be left behind. And brutally so.

   Nobody cares about how hard it is, how much you’ll have to study, how long you’ll have to practice, and how many times you’ll have to fail: staying competent (not being competent) will be non-negotiable.

8. Spirit: if you don't care about you, nothing else matters. Body, mind and spirit all work together to make the humans we are. While the cooperation between body and mind seems quite straightforward, the spirit part took me a while to understand. I am not naturally a spiritual person, not particularly religious either: in fact, I always thought all that stuff was a pile of bullsh*t. However, with time I came to appreciate the benefits that come with introspection, big picture reflection and coming to realization that we are not just flesh. Choose your own flavor: it can be a god, God, the Holy Spirit or an animal, but try to find a super-human meaning. I know I want to improve here.

9. Independence: I often joke with my family that, to survive, I only need some food, the sun, the sea, and an internet connection. That's a joke, but less one that it sounds.

   I have many interests: very few of them require much stuff. I moved around too many times in my life to value objects. I value experiences, I like doing, learning, dealing with people and, above all, I like creating. I am not always good at it, but who cares: I just love the process.

   Staying light “outside” helps me with staying light “inside”, and gives me a level of mental safety that many people undervalue. If all you need is within you, who the f*** can touch you?

10. Calm: I said before I'm not naturally patient. Well, it turns out I'm also not naturally calm. I jump the gun often, I fire up quickly, I swear a lot. While I'm probably never going to fix the swearing part, I want to improve on my ability to keep calm through turbulent times. A bit of it is genetic, but surely a lot of it is deliberate practice. I recognize I have improved a lot in the last decade, so I am particularly excited to see what I can achieve in the next one. A calm mind is powerful: it allows for clear thinking, more accurate decision-making and more precise actions. Calm instills confidence, in you and the ones around you.

11. Risk: talk about a real challenge. How to balance taking risks with being calmer? Taking a risk to achieve wild objectives requires some balls the courage to face uncertainty. No matter if you are starting a business in crypto, riding a superbike on a race track, scuba diving with sharks, the outcome counts less than the process, because through our risk-seeking endeavors we become more resilient, confident and skilled.

    I was born in a culture that does not celebrate risk. Predictability and comfort was valued more than randomness and creativity, so I had to work a bit on myself to change that mindset. I’m energized to go harder on this path of personal growth in the next decade.

For the next ten years, I want to develop techniques to improve across these eleven dimensions.

Likely, I won't be able to focus on each trait every day, but keeping tab of these 11 themes will help me steer my inner self in the right direction.

Now that my personal north star is set, I recognize that my priorities may change in the future. It’s possible. Perhaps get ready for a yearly post about this.

Now, a question. What about you? Have you ever thought of the things you want to develop for yourself in the next decade?

In the 2000s, I used to work for a small boutique consultancy specialized in financial software in London, UK. We used to build solutions that allowed, for example, a Northern European bank to sell a savings product with 7% yield.

Seven percent (a few years later, the Great Financial Crisis would hit - but that's another story).

When building that software, developers and product managers were collaborating using a methodology quite fancy but still unusual at the time. Despite it being already a couple of decades in the making, this approach was not yet widely popular. It was, really, only known to “insiders” as Agile, and it prescribed a very different way to go about software development.

You can read the full post here: www.mc10.xyz/agile-moment-crypto/

You face similar challenges in your personal life too.

Most people have high time-preference: they are very bad at delaying gratification. We, humans, are instinctively lousy at understanding that something feeling not-so-good now will be actually very good for us later, and the other way around. People have, in general, poor instincts for discerning between productive and non-productive activities.

This notion may sound crazy to you at first, but let’s spend the next six minutes together to discuss it.

Masked time-wasters

In life, when dealing with your personal growth, and in business, when dealing with your organization’s growth, there are activities that, if tackled intentionally and purposefully, do move the needle.

The same set of activities, when performed mindlessly and sloppily, do not actually get you closer to your goals: they only give you the illusion of progress.

Knowing that you acted mindlessly and sloppily is not always easy.

There are certain types of time-wasting activities that like to wear a mask and you’re cheated into believing they are the right things to do at a point in time. I’ll give you a couple of examples.

“The books”

Perhaps, you may have heard of people that claim to read 100 books a year. If your favorite hobby is wandering around Twitter, you surely have.

Most people have to juggle the activity of reading books with lots of other (professional and personal) chores - many of which are stressful, tiring and time-consuming. For some people, reading books may be their primary occupation, but in that case we would be dealing with a very lucky bunch. And a very small one.

Practically, the most likely scenario is that within this group of “voracious readers”, the vast majority of people is, yes, reading a lot but, no, not retaining much.

In other words, they believe they are spending their time productively (reading books is useful) when in reality they are treading water. Possibly, simply avoiding to take action by reading a few more pages.

“The meetings”

If you, like me, spent a chunk of your life in corporate environments, you know that one of the favorite time-killers of corporate bureaucrats is organizing meetings. Often, the outcome of the meeting is a (consensus-reached) decision to arrange the next one.

Days and weeks pass by where you see yourself hopping from meeting to meeting, with little or no significant progress at the matter at hand.

If you just run your professional life on autopilot, it is very likely you are mistaking an essentially time-wasting activity, such as arranging a meeting so that you can have another one right after it, for a productive one.

Drawing the line

Drawing the line between a productive and a non-productive activity is harder than it seems because certain tasks are very good at disguising themselves.

Imagine you spend your day binging on Netflix. You sit on your sofa, can of Coke and bag of chips in your hands, and you don't leave the comfort of your cushions for the next 8 hours.

Well, at the end of the Netflix marathon watching the Kardashians, you need only a few seconds of reflection to know that you just squandered an entire day.

It’s not that straight-forward when you’re dealing with masked time-wasters.

Back to our examples, reading books can be tremendously helpful, but only if you understand what you are reading, retain the author’s core messages, and give yourself time to digest them. If you don't do that, then reading is just another way of procrastinating.

Same goes for filling your calendar with meetings, by the way. All you are doing is avoiding work. I have been there.

This is what you are doing:

You are focusing on the easy things at the expense of the hard things.

How to handle the masked time-wasters?

Then, how do we handle these masked time-wasters to ensure we act effectively without indulging in procrastination and complacency?

What actions can we take to improve our outcomes?

Handling “The books”

My friend Franz has his own theory about it, and I buy much of it. He loves anki as his spaced repetition tool of choice.

His premise is that it doesn't matter how many books you read, what’s relevant is how much of the important information discussed in those books sticks with you. Spaced repetition ensures that your brain crystallizes ideas you may have read, and that you successfully internalize them.

We internalize a concept when it becomes part of our personal arsenal of knowledge and we naturally leverage that knowledge to make decisions and take action.

When we look at “reading books” from this perspective, suddenly we're no more counting how many books we have read, but rather how many big ideas we have internalized.

Handling “The meetings”

Metacognition can also help you dealing with death by a thousand meetings.

It is no secret I am a huge fan of remote work. I wrote a post about it here.

I find remote work more efficient and more manageable because it allows a better balance between my personal and professional lives. I also find that remote work naturally forces me to interact more asynchronously with my team members.

We can learn a lot from this.

Asynchronicity requires that your writing (if you do it properly) does most of your communication. You discover that what would have typically been a meeting can be replaced by a memo. A meeting can still be helpful or necessary, but only when it’s context-heavy, and only if you have pre-agreed that its outcome is an actionable decision, not some make-work strategy like “we need another one”.

How to get better?

As we discussed before, people don't have an intuitive way to discern what to do now, from what to do tomorrow, from what not to do at all.

I suspect the ability to get better at business productivity is one where experience does matter. You won't know how this whole thing really works unless you've done it yourself.

But experience by itself is worth little, as K. Anders Ericsson explains well in his book Peak: doctors who practiced for decades but never really cared about practicing deliberately (ie, with a focus on improving and keeping their skills up to date) perform worse than younger doctors.

Whenever I talk about experience I don't just mean “number of years”: I give a much more qualitative connotation to this metric. I care little about what you did in the last 20 years, but I care a lot about what you learned. I care about the mental frames of reference you internalized to identify priorities, act on what's important and cut out the noise.

OK, MC10. Enough fluff. Any actionable advice?

I’ve got some.

1. It all starts with realizing that you may have encountered a masked time-waster. Metacognition (thinking about thinking) helps you keep your actions in check. Run your brain in debug mode, as I once heard Naval say. Ask yourself why you are doing what you are doing.

2. Brainstorm options with a trusted person, somebody who already went through what you are going through now. Avoid generic coaches. Instead, go straight to people that have scars, because they have field-tested the solutions they suggest.

3. Cross-pollinate as much as possible. Often, we tend to look at problems with a narrow perspective. Instead, think of what you can learn from adjacent disciplines that could be relevant to the challenge you are facing.

4. Try “stuff out” and be intentional with evaluating the feedback you inevitably receive from reality. Make calculated mistakes and never trade safety (that keeps you in the status quo) for recoverable mistakes (that have the potential to advance you).

You owe it to yourself, your business, your partners and clients to act on the things that are most useful and to tackle the activities that actually ensure progress.

Conclusive Thoughts

In life and in business, it’s hard to know how to direct your efforts to make progress.

While certain activities are obviously a waste of time, some others are very good at hiding. These masked time-wasters are particularly dangerous because they give you the illusion of progress while, in truth, they enable procrastination.

Learning from people with the right experience, metacognition, cross-pollination and experimentation are all tactics that can be helpful for you to apply so that you keep moving the needle.

If we assume that the WWW revolutionized information, and that the Web2 revolutionized interactions, the Web3 has the potential to revolutionize agreements and value exchange. The Web3 changes the data structures in the backend of the Internet, introducing a universal state layer, often by incentivizing network actors with a token. The backbone of this Web3 is represented by a series of blockchain networks or similar distributed ledgers.

In a web3 context, tokens are ways to distribute ownership of something, in a way that, thanks to the underlying blockchain, is native to the platform or the protocol and doesn't require intermediaries.

Sometimes I meet people that believe that modeling a token economy equates to engineering a Ponzi scheme. This is especially true when I meet people that don’t know what they are talking about.

Their reasoning is something along these lines: “You want to own a token just because you expect that it will appreciate in value over time, so that you can sell it to somebody else that also expects that same token will continue to appreciate in value”.

That is a way of seeing the world - which actually is totally analogous to buying, say, TSLA 2.42%↑ shares hoping they will go up so that, in some time, you can sell them to the next person that still believes there'll be 1 million robotaxis on the roads by 2020.

I am not entirely sure how the two scenarios are fundamentally different, but that is not even my argument.

You can read the full article here: https://www.mc10.xyz/why-token-economies-are-not-a-fad/

1. Mistakes are both inevitable and useful.

2. Utility is found in knowledge, not in ignorance.

3. Learning is another word for mistake.

In real life, the only way to truly learn is by doing: we discover this lesson (the hard way) the day we get out of school.

That day, we find out that what we know (or thought we knew) doesn't always apply to reality. Practical challenges arise and we are forced to find ways to do things and overcome obstacles that are not necessarily in line with what we knew.

Illustrator Harsh Darji explains it in a picture:

Unfortunately, we find out, knowing isn’t doing.

As we go through the process of discovering these new ways of operating we, inevitably, make mistakes.

You can spend years making mistakes (hopefully not repeating the same ones!): you make a mistake, you reflect, you learn from it and you keep going.

When evaluating yourself, another person or a business, “experience” carries some weight as a proxy metric, but far more important is the intentional learning that people and organizations alike demonstrably derived from all their past mistakes.

Mistakes-making as art

Mistakes are, therefore, to be encouraged because, as we just discussed, we learn through them.

Why then do we look at mistakes as something bad?

Society loves simplified boundaries: left or right, win or lose, good or bad, right or wrong. Traditional choices are typically rewarded by group thinking, and you are always a bit frowned upon if you deviate even slightly from the common route.

Making mistakes is an art. Make too big of a mistake and you are in trouble, possibly dead. Make no mistakes and you are stuck in your boring comfort zone: you learn nothing. It is a fine balance.

To learn new stuff, you need to experiment. We know that experiments lead to innovation and new knowledge, however what we also know about experiments is that lots of them don’t work.

Many moons ago, when I was about to complete my Computer Engineering degree, my professor told me: “We might do a lot of research around one topic and spend a lot of time going nowhere because we were using the wrong approach. That is fine: that’s an absolutely acceptable outcome of research”.

Naval explains this idea in a concise way:

Naval

@naval

No progress is possible without trial and error. Not in business, not in science, not in nature.

Without failure, there is no learning, no progress, and no success.

1,292

10:38 PM • Jan 23, 2020

Even in the highly efficient human brain, at each step, information is expanded with mistakes, potentially irrelevant content whose usefulness is, possibly, only revealed in subsequent steps.

Luca Dellanna

@DellAnnaLuca

Even in the human brain, whose efficiency we can safely assume to be very high, as information climbs the hierarchy from one region to the other, at each other step information is expanded with potentially irrelevant content whose usefulness is only revealed at the next step.

12

11:04 PM • Jan 23, 2020

Therefore, let's desensitize the word mistake. It's not good. It's not bad. It is simply a fact of life.

Just like a pint of beer: it's good on a hot summer day when you are at the pub with your mates. It's probably not good at 7 o’clock in the morning when you just woke up and you're getting ready for an important meeting at work.

Mistakes in web3. Mistakes in business. Mistakes in life.

We all heard the Silicon Valley adage “Move fast and break things”.

That makes sense if you are a fast-paced start-up, thoughtfully (or maybe not) moving toward the edges of what's possible. In that environment, you are guaranteed to be making mistakes: that's great because you have no other way of uncovering what works and what doesn't. You are trying to get a sense of the boundaries.

In web3, it's even easier to make mistakes because we are all, quite literally, flying blind. The vast majority of crypto-ventures are at start-up stage. Building an industry from scratch isn't easy: we have very few reference points.

Opportunities for mistakes are abundant.

More in general, this is just how life works when you're growing by exploring the unknown. Usually, all things being equal, the more mistakes you experienced in the past, the more you learned from them, the better you are equipped to deal with the next curve ball that life will throw at you. Or the next Centralized Exchange that will light your money on fire. It's life.

At some point in the journey, though, making mistakes becomes more consequential. When you managed to build a scaled business, for example, a mistake can have massive externalities that are dangerous for you, your company, your industry and for many, many people. In crypto, new entrants at any point in time cyclically (every few months) learn this lesson.

However, even in large businesses, you must continue experimenting and, therefore, you must keep making mistakes. A culture of experimentation can ensure the business stays relevant: it is its antidote to competition.

How do you ensure you experiment safely (or as safely as possible)?

You’ve got to consider three things:

1. Make sure your experiments are off the critical path. Those initiatives should be relevant, but not yet too important for your core business;

2. Avoid failures that completely wipe you out - the “catastrophic outcome” that Nassim Taleb warns about;

3. Avoid failures at operational excellence (ie, the bit you’re good at because you know exactly how it works).

Other than the three caveats above, feel free to make plenty of mistakes and just ensure you learn from them as quickly as you can.

It is worth repeating:

Make mistakes, reflect on the outcome, acknowledge what went wrong, and then just f*cking move on.

Both you and your organization will gain a ton by doing this because when you fail, learn and come back up, you are practicing self-reliance and resourcefulness. You are building new confidence that will serve you well as you grow in life and your business touches new highs.

Conclusive Thoughts

Mistakes are a fact of life. It is how humans and organizations learn: progress comes from mistakes.

In fast-moving start-ups, mistakes are an everyday event.

In web3 businesses, they are inevitable as a new industry is getting formed and new boundaries are discovered.

Large organizations are less forgiving of mistakes, yet they must seek them as strategic experimentation ensures they stay relevant.

Making mistakes leads to learning, but this process it doesn’t happen by magic: it is important to acknowledge the mistakes we make, reflect on the lessons we learned and move on rapidly.

Towards the next one.

These are bad, bad, bad numbers, that also concern adjacent sectors of which NFTs are an integral part. I’m thinking of blockchain-based "metaverses", such as Decentraland or The Sandbox, that leverage these types of tokens for the sale of virtual land at the core of their operations.

If a year ago Decentraland was boasting 200,000 daily users, today this figure has crashed by more than 70%. The same goes for its main competitor, The Sandbox, which has lost about a third of its users since April 2022.

Big stuff.

The Times They Are a-Changin'…

The times when Jack Dorsey could sell the NFT of his first tweet for $2.9m, when the iconic Doge meme changed hands for $4m, when the collection of works of Beeple's Everydays art was sold for $69m are long gone.

Now, you cannot just be spelling N, F and T and be hoping to get rich.

Jack Dorsey's tweet lost 99% of its price and was recently valued at $132; while the NFT of the Azuki collection purchased by YouTuber Logan Paul for over $600,000 is now estimated at a tenner, like the British say. That’s $10.

In short, the speculative bubble has burst and some of the purchases that have taken place over the last two years have revealed themselves for what they were: absurdities.

…but not everything is lost

However, not all is lost.

The end of an irrational financial cycle does not also indicate the end of a technology.

Additionally, the bursting of the NFT bubble must be contextualized in a historical period, the post-pandemic, where the euphoria that had infected the markets in the last two years has collapsed almost everywhere.

The cryptocurrency sector is down nearly 70% over the last 12 months, and so are the stocks of many Nasdaq giants: META 0.41%↑, AMZN -0.16%↓, TSLA -0.63%↓, ZM 2.48%↑ , SHOP -1.13%↓ are all down between 40% and 70% . To make my point further I could list down practically every holding in Cathie Wood’s portfolio, but I'm a nice guy and will spare you from that.

Was joking: these are her Top 10 holdings!

We can therefore look at the free fall of NFTs as part of a broader and more generalized drop in the risk-on markets, which hit the most speculative options harder.

Some of the stuff that had benefited the most during the most critical phase of the pandemic (social networks, home deliveries, streaming, platforms for video conferencing, etc) is now beaten up. And so, not only was the NFT bubble a bubble (therefore it was going to pop, sooner or later), but its bursting was boosted by the difficult financial environment.

Euphoria had peaked, as I discussed recently here on Paragraph.

Yet, on a more in-depth look, there are many reasons to believe that NFTs will play an increasingly important role in our digital society, although not necessarily (or, perhaps, not only) linked to collectibles, art and speculation.

Some recent events seem to confirm this thesis: the NFT trading market recently launched by Reddit has already captured more users than OpenSea. At the same time, both Facebook and Instagram are integrating NFTs, while Apple is working to enable the sale of digital content associated with NFTs within its App Store.

This may get very interesting very quickly.

And so the question: are these things just overpriced JPEGs?

Unlike many cryptocurrencies, NFTs perform a clear function: thanks to the blockchain, they allow the transfer of the concept of property - and therefore of value - in the digital world which, until recently, was characterized by infinite reproducibility. Scarcity was impossible to achieve digitally before the discovery of Bitcoin.

An NFT is a stamp that certifies the ownership of a digital asset. Sometimes, the stamp is very fancy and you may be willing to use it as your PFP, or frame it like you’d do with a Picasso. In industries where these assets are part of an increasingly important ecosystem (for example, as accessories to customize video-games characters), a tool of this sort offers compelling advantages.

These things can be applied to a bunch of fields: from the financial sector to digital identity, from logistics to marketing. What is probably sensible is to stop associating NFTs only with CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club and start considering them more for what they are: digital certificates of ownership.

In the logistics sector, NFTs can create 'digital passports' that certify movements along the supply chain of a product, relying on the immutability of the blockchain.

In the field of digital identity, you can have identity certificates through NFTs that you cannot counterfeit and are digitally signed.

NFTs can also be used to record the sales of physical artwork, thus automatically storing on the blockchain every transaction linked to a specific item. This is super cool. Why? Because this enables the author of the work to automatically receive a percentage from each transaction! This practically solves one of the biggest challenges that emerging artists face: in many cases, they must assist helpless to their works being exchanged at increasing prices without receiving jack.

My larger point is: forget about those overpriced JPEGs. Forget about the very concept of NFT itself.

When this technology matures, the complexity behind it will be hidden by its utility and we will know we got there because of one simple reason: we won’t be talking about it anymore.

Conclusive thoughts

It wasn’t a pretty few months for NFTs: trading volumes slumped and their popularity drastically decreased. The burst of the speculative trading phase of NFTs can be seen in the context of a much wider change of sentiment across various risk-on assets, from crypto to tech stocks.

However, the technology offers compelling use cases for future development and its applicability is being tested across many industries.

NFTs were long solely seen as overpriced JPEGs but soon will be used as an integral part of the digital economy: immutable witnesses of on-chain ownership.

A swift comeback to reality will be healthy for everyone.

Grounding yourself into reality does not have to mean turning to pessimism, cynicism, or negativity. It means, quite literally, being realistic.

Being realistic implies not getting overwhelmed by irrational euphoria, by FOMO, by the trends of a moment, by the absurd idea that things can grow exponentially indefinitely.

In the last two years, we heard it all. We heard of paradigm shifts that would justify any price and heard of fantastic new technologies that would solve complex problems within a matter of weeks. Indeed, new technologies are undoubtedly going to solve complex problems - it just takes, you know, a lot of time, consistent action, and very few mistakes.

You can read the full post here: https://www.mc10.xyz/come-back-to-reality/

Now, the juice.

What is also true about most people is that they don't have a deliberate process to help them distinguish problems from non-problems, and a set of steps to follow to prioritize what falls in the problems category.

The full article is published on https://www.mc10.xyz/the-problem-with-problems/

How can businesses navigate this tectonic shift, capture value, establish new business models and defend them?

To answer these questions, let’s first have a look at some of the key distinctions that differentiate the current landscape, known as web2, from the upcoming one, web3.

Web2 key players managed to gain powerful positions in the global business arena by way of centralizing technology services and exploited “extreme” data monetization by leveraging information captured from the user itself. Often, free services are given to customers who effectively become the product being sold. This business model is enabled by a technical infrastructure that has its basis in proprietary code and data, and platforms that are not interoperable with each other.

The full article is published on https://www.mc10.xyz/businesses-opportunities-for-value-creation-in-web3/

Usage of employee monitoring software across companies went from 30% to over 60% in just 2.5 years.

Companies not trusting the people working for them is perhaps one of the most resounding failures of organizations.

Monitoring inputs instead of outcomes is an evident admission that companies are clueless on how to effectively, or at all, measure value creation by their own employees. This is a somewhat tricky challenge because, when outcomes are sufficiently abstract and hard to quantify, it may be tempting to use inputs as quantifiable proxy measures.

The reality is different though, and companies need to be a bit more creative and thoughtful to come up with a way to accurately measure impact.

The old guard’s solution to this problem is simple and simplistic at the same time.

Bring everybody back to the office. Kill remote working. Micro-manage.

Many web3 organizations that flourished over the last few years have adopted a remote-first way of working since inception. It is not unusual for web3 founders to work together for years before meeting in person, or for web3 companies to have employees and contractors sitting in dozens of different countries. At Bankless Consulting, we cover four continents with all our consultants and the genesis team has never met in person as a whole!

Web3 went remote-first because the benefits of remote work by far outweigh its downsides.

Offering a great work/life balance to employees, allowing travel while you work, enabling geo-arbitrage with salary and cost living, saving company’s budget in commercial real estate, and overall creating better conditions for the workers are some of the reasons why remote work took off so dramatically, also accelerated by the COVID crisis.

So, what can TradCos learn from the web3 approach?

Why killing remote work is wrong

Remote work is about empowering the individuals and trusting them that they will get the job done, no matter where they are physically located when doing that job.

Some argue that, especially for new joiners in an organization, remote work isn’t really that great. It creates barriers for the new hires to get to understand the company culture or its specific way of working, and this eventually impacts engagement - they say.

There are elements of truth there, but I challenge the solution proposal.

The effort should not focus on regressing to an inferior form of organizational design (employees back in offices), but rather on upgrading towards a better version of the present: let’s call it remote++.

Preaching that we should revert to the office context because remote does not work well in this or that particular use case would be the equivalent of having stopped any progress on the aircraft autopilot technology after the first crash.

Things are not perfect, but the trajectory is clear.

Focus on engagement…

The focus should shift back to talent engagement: how do we engage our team effectively?

A few ideas for consideration may include:

1. Alignment to the organization’s core mission is key when addressing the engagement levels of your workforce. Of course, a company’s aspirational purpose won't be attractive to all potential candidates out there, but it has to resonate with those that have the capabilities to advance your organization.

2. A culture of written communication is a plus for any team. It enables people that are not present at a meeting to catch up on the work without feeling being left out. Because writing is asynchronous, it saves time that is otherwise spent on calls, hybrid or in-person meetings, hence increasing productivity. Because clear writing is clear thinking, the team’s outputs will be higher in quality too.

3. Sterile-sounding missions such as “increasing shareholders’ value” do nothing to increase engagement. Creating happy customers works, not trying to make dollars for faceless people who you don't relate to, called “shareholders”.

4. Don’t rely exclusively on monetary incentives for motivation. Pay well to start with, and make career advancement a very achievable reward for performance excellence. Fast-track the best people, because those are likely the ones that embody your company’s values the most, and will naturally coach new joiners to become the resources your company needs.

5. Companies pay different wages to different people that perform the same job, and think those being paid less will ‘understand’. Instead, make sure that the allocation of benefits is fair and proportional to the outcomes produced.

All of the above is hard to accomplish consistently by organizations of any size but it’s important to create a work environment that features what Roger Martin refers to as a uniform and unfailing humanity.

…then look at processes and technology

Once you sort out your engagement problem, then you can tackle the process and technology challenges.

In a remote-first work environment, I agree that new resources at an organization may feel a bit left out when joining a new company. This is especially true in “apprenticeship” types of careers which, really, include most of the knowledge work.

Many crypto-ventures faced this challenge too, and experimented with various tactics to solve for it.

The strategy here is to create processes within your organization that break the technology-induced barriers of remote work.

A few ideas:

• have regular phone or video call check-ins from leaders in your organization: this can do wonders for employees’ morale;

• listen to the feedback of workers and action on it;

• carefully craft an onboarding plan for new joiners: explain how you work, where to find the most important information about the company, interesting facts about team members, explain acronyms, etc. It should be all automated so to “curate” their initial couple of months at the new organization.

• arrange regular all-day sessions, structured thoughtfully, similar to legacy All Hands or Town Halls. Have the employees meet in person where feasible. Have the new people meet and socialize. Provide and discuss updates on the business. Because these sessions need proper planning to be impactful, you can't have them too often. Find a cadence that works for your teams: perhaps start with a monthly frequency and finetune accordingly;

• Share personal stories with your team members. Make a genuine effort to build a connection with them. Take time to get to know them as a person and create the opportunity for them to get to know you. Work together, synchronously, on a few tasks. Share your stories and share your screen.

Conclusive thoughts

Remote work is here to stay.

The companies that will be able to distill the right approaches and scale the most effective technologies will end up hiring and retaining the best talent out there.

Knowledge workers are spending their days immersed in their suite of digital communication tools and will be doing so more and more over the coming years. From design to meetings, to notes, to brainstorming, and other collaboration activities: it’s all online already if you haven’t noticed!

Organizations that will go “remote-first” and are thoughtful about the ways to engage their people will enable their teams to be faster, more efficient, more inclusive, and more transparent. Gone are the days of in-person politics and long commutes. Work will be done remotely and from anywhere by workers that feel humanized by their leaders when given the chance to perform at their best independently.

On the contrary, companies that abandon the remote-forward path will slowly lose ground against more progressive and innovative firms.

It's a market, after all.

Web3 is the frontier.

Technology advancements in this arena are fast-paced. Crypto-ideas and web3 products’ utility can appear somewhat confusing and hard to grasp for the general public. While this has caused a certain mistrust amongst non-web3 professionals towards this new tech area, we believe that an expert guide can help draw a path for organizations to enter web3 with confidence.

Diving into web3 means unlocking new business possibilities that were previously inaccessible to traditional corporates, or TradCos in the crypto-lingo.

If you are a Corporate Executive, a decision maker responsible for growing a part of the business, or an ambitious manager willing to bring innovation into your department, then keep reading.

The start of the journey

From the start, you’re up to a few challenges.

• How do you make sense of the tech when the information you get is confusing, at times contradictory, rarely actionable, and just so messy?

• How do you do that while working long hours just to run your existing, established business?

• How do you arrange building blocks like DAOs, NFTs, tokens, DeFi, etc in a coherent way that can generate tangible results for your business?

• How do you set a clear vision for your organization in web3?

These questions are hard. Fortunately, we have identified the approaches that get to the answers very quickly - we understand the window to seize a strategic advantage is narrow.

Bankless Consulting’s Web3 Discovery Sprint program was specifically designed to provide TradCos’ professionals with a mix between an educational product and a comprehensive web3 strategy for their business.

We called it a sprint because we want to give you the answers that matter to you in just a few weeks: this is not an exercise that will require months of your valuable time!

To reach your objectives, our experts perfected a methodology that combines elements of Convergent/Divergent idea exploration, Design Thinking approaches and business strategy.

The Web3 Discovery Sprint phases

Our exclusive Web3 Discovery Sprint encompasses four key phases.

Let’s have a quick look at them.

1. We start from you: we understand what drives your business, what your strategic context is, and what your objectives are. Where do you see your business in the short, medium and long-term?

   We then start discussing the web3 primitives that, when purposely orchestrated, can give you the results you are after. To do this properly, we first spend some time with your team to identify the problem that we are trying to solve.

   At this stage, we are careful to only talk about the problem not to prematurely constrain any outcome. Without a crystal clear delineation of the problem, it is unlikely we will be able to come up with a helpful solution.

2. Once we identify the problem we want to tackle, we move into solution ideation.

   This is where we apply the desirability, feasibility and viability lenses to ensure the solution we eventually select is the one that your customers will find helpful, that you can implement given your budget constraints and that is technically sturdy.

3. But this is not all just talk. The Web3 Discovery Sprint is also a doing practice. Somebody smarter than me (maybe Confucius, or perhaps Benjamin Franklin… you know how quotes are attributed on the internet!) said: 

   Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn. 

   Clever pitch, so we thought of making the sprint not just about theory!

   As part of the program, we take some time to develop a low-fidelity prototype with you that makes you touch and feel how the solution will stand together.

4. After a series of high-intensity, high-collaboration, fast-paced working sessions - this is a sprint after all! - where our experts guide your team through problems, solution options and implementation assessment, we turn the table around.

   It’s now your team that will pitch the final product to the Bankless Consulting Board: let’s call it a web3 shark tank.

   You will be asked to present our co-designed idea to some of our senior members whom you have never met before, and they will give you additional feedback and thoughts.

   We finally help you crystallize the roadmap by synthesizing all the work we’ve done together in a litepaper, a web3 strategy that is ready for the next step: the implementation.

Because we want to be relevant to your industry and your business, before kicking off the program, we will ensure that your strategic outcomes are discussed with our team first, so that we can design the timeline and the program details around what you want to get out of this exercise.

There’s no cookie-cutter approach, but by leveraging this framework we will ensure all the critical points in drafting a web3 strategy for your products or services are touched, and the outcomes you receive translate into strategic advantages for your team.

The benefits for you and your team

Our consultants are professionals with decades of experience in technology, marketing, strategy and economics. They have been learning and experimenting with cryptoassets and decentralization since the early days of web3. That’s what we mean when we say that we are web3-native.

We believe that taking your team through Bankless Consulting’s Web3 Discovery Sprint will give you immediate business benefits that include:

• improved understanding of key web3 concepts and terminology;

• aligned objectives and vision across all your team members;

• crystal-clear identification of the industry problem your business will solve;

• a well-defined solution that addresses the selected industry problem;

• a structured business case for change that you can use for funding request and/or further leadership approval.

We are ready to get to work.

Drop me a message if you want to start a conversation.

But the scenery suddenly went unusual when I turned the corner that accesses the main street. There I saw a LONG queue of more than 90 people occupying the entire sidewalk over a big distance: they were all waiting to go into the local fried chicken shop.

This scene was quite surprising to me. Why would you queue that long for some fried chicken?! I decided to ask one of the tons of people in line.

A chicken surprise

I found out that the local shop had come up with a “promotion” valid for that day only: they would give ONE large chicken wing for free to each of the first hundred clients to claim it.

ONE chicken wing.

I estimated the waiting time in the queue to be well over 30 minutes. I know that in that shop, normally, a chicken wing box costs $15 and that includes 3 large wings. Some complex math (😅) shows that this “special deal” was effectively valued at $5.

Now, I love fried chicken, don't get me wrong, but would I trade 30+ minutes of my time standing in line on a sunny Saturday for a $5 perk?

When I asked myself this question and glanced over that huge line again, my head started spinning. Seriously.

How can all these people value a $5 gift more than their own time?

Time is the only scarce resource we all have to deal with: nothing else is even close to it when it comes to irreplaceability. Queuing for more than half an hour hoping to make a whole $5 out of it, means that you are virtually setting your hourly rate to less than $10 per hour. Which should sound ridiculous if your time investment is in expectation of some fried chicken.

How I think about my time

My thoughts quickly went to a concept I had first encountered years ago from Naval Ravikant, an entrepreneur and VC best known to Twitter folks as the “Angel philosopher”. He had come up with an interesting “policy” for himself: assign an insanely high hourly rate for your time, and spend money to save time according to that figure.

Naval

@naval

Value your time at an hourly rate and ruthlessly spend to save time at that rate. You will never be worth more than you think you're worth.

382

12:15 PM • Jul 11, 2016

This strategy may sound outlandish when you hear about it first. But if you think a bit through it, it is not.

Let me explain the way I interpret it.

I value my time more than anything else. I choose to use it productively. I aim to maximize the time I spend in activities that leverage the skills I’m best at. This means I rarely engage in mindless time-wasters or do things without a specific purpose. This also means that I don’t feel bad asking somebody else to cover areas where I am not that strong or where my input could be limited due to my lack of knowledge.

I love relaxation time, spending time with family and friends, playing sports, and the outdoors. I do all of those things intentionally because I realized that investing part of my time that way is helpful to my mental and physical well-being. In general, I believe that spending your precious time in a way that best aligns with your life goals and objectives, is the most effective way to actually “feel good”.

The pre-requisite to achieving this state is, of course, to first assess and understand what indeed is most important for you.

Essentially, you have to draft a plan, set the direction, identify your utter commitment, and then run with it - even if that may mean giving up some free fried chicken on a Saturday afternoon.

In a business context, in my role at Bankless Consulting, the web3-native consulting firm from BanklessDAO, I'm committed to growing our footprint and ensuring client’s success. This includes contributing to the project outcomes and having smooth project delivery, all while hitting certain financial metrics that guarantee quality deliverables for our clients at a reasonable profit for the business.

I do have a lot on my plate so I focus my attention on the largest leverage tasks, and I complete them myself to the best standard I can possibly achieve.

I delegate, automate or ignore the smaller tasks that do not require my valuable and unique skills to get done, or the tasks that I am not qualified to take on (reminder: I’m good at a few things but I’m also not good at many things). I choose to maintain oversight over stuff that may require my input and where my expertise could be helpful, but that’s pretty much it.

Ça va sans dire, life doesn't always run as planned so there are occasions when I deviate from these principles. But that's beside the point: once you set a certain direction, you'll stick with it whenever possible.

Since you cannot “mine” more time, it should be obvious that once you spend it on a low-value activity, that time is gone forever. This inevitability leaves you worse off because of your poor decision.

If you choose to spend your time on low-value endeavors, then you must make sure that you truly made that call consciously.

Unpredictable circumstances may force you to act differently from your ideal case. That's fine, and that's life - just be aware of it.

Conclusion

At the risk of being mistaken for a productivity guru (which I’m not, nor want to become), I believe most people could yield life-changing benefits from a hard look at how they spend their time, day in and day out.

With a finite amount of time available to do all the stuff you want to do, three things are of invaluable importance in organizing your life: prioritization, focus, and discipline.

I am glad I went for that walk last weekend. It sparked a reflection that reinforced my intuition: standing still in a line trying to scrounge a chicken wing is hardly worth your time🍗.