Amazon buffets the shores of brick and mortar retailers. No business is Amazon-proof. No business is sacred in the internet-era.
We have to assume that everything we do today will at some point be replaced by something quicker, cheaper, and more personalized.
Dumping the problems on tomorrow will get us rekt.
How do we remain anti-fragile?
The first thing Darwin’s finches did was grow adaptive beaks. They survived by optimizing their behavior for the micro-market. Some formed specialized beaks just for eating seeds, other grubs, buds and fruit, and insects.
Specialization prolonged their survival.
Sure, the big companies have all the data. But their experience at harvesting attention often fails to attract the customer in search of a unique experience.
Sometimes your work is just going to be a 5 out of 10. It’s not worth scrutinizing every performance. The only ill is hesitating, not starting what you think you should do.
Jeff Bezos has an interesting system for making decisions. He sees them as either irreversible or reversible. The simple heuristic pushed him to start Amazon, knowing that he could just go back to his old job if things didn’t work out. Writes the Farnam Street blog:
“Bezos considers 70% certainty to be the cut-off point where it is appropriate to make a decision. That means acting once we have 70% of the required information, instead of waiting longer. Making a decision at 70% certainty and then course-correcting is a lot more effective than waiting for 90% certainty.”
First we try, then we deduce
If the door swings both ways, why not give whatever we’re passionate about our best shot. The worst that can happen is that someone slams the door in our face or locks the other side. And that may be just the message that it’s time to pivot. They’re meant to astonish us, to jolt us out of our everyday thoughts:
We don’t need to collect all the information before we endeavor. We can reduce indecision by replacing it with the astonishment of doing. There is little reason to think in absolutes. Wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson: “All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”
“All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”
52 Insightsinterviewed legendary business strategist and author Don Tapscott about the blockchain. Bitcoin is the archetype, kind of like how email was for the web.
His predictions are always worth listening to:
The blockchain is the second frontier of the Internet:
The way that we view it is that blockchain represents the second era of the internet. The first era for decades was the internet of information. Now we’re getting an internet of value. Where anything of value which including money, our identities, cultural assets like music, even a vote can be stored, managed, transacted and moved around in a secure private way. And where trust is not achieved by an intermediary it’s achieved by collaborative cryptography through some clever code which is why Alex and I call it the trust protocol. Trust is native to the medium.
Illustration by 52 insights
The blockchain benefits the stagnant middle class:
We do have a prosperity paradox today, that for the first time in history our economies are growing, but our prosperity is declining, we have growing wealth but a stagnant middle class, the only solution to this problem is the so-called redistribution of wealth taxing the rich and distributing the wealth. We believe what blockchain enables is a redistribution of wealth that is through blockchain we can create a more of a democratic economy where we a priori distribute the wealth through peoples direct interaction with the economy.
Creatives will get their cake and eat it too:
We can ensure that creatives of value are more fairly compensated, so songwriters who have had their revenue destroyed by the internet can now post music on the blockchain and because of a smart contract your music is now protected by intellectual property rights. So those are just a handful of ways where we can create a more democratic economy in the first place.
The blockchain is future of the economic order where everyone owns their own virtual identity, all backed by ‘cryptographic proof.’ But will blockchain empower more equality or unfold into data exploitation as the FANG (Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon) have done to round one of the internet?
Consistency is a series of small efforts that over time add up to create a big impact. Seth Godin calls this ‘the drip.’ Simon Sinek refers to them as ‘the little things.’
Do small things. They add up.
Little things are the deeds one fulfills over a period of time. Whether it’s for love or business, good habits strengthen relationships and build trust.
It turns out that honesty and unselfishness are good for companies and good for life.
