Assets, currency, and Web 3.0 - Why you should never work for currency, NFT-based revenue structures, the importance of owning your creations, and why I’m comfortable going to zero
“If money can be used to solve a problem, it’s not a problem.”
- Silicon Valley proverb
Key Takeaways:
If you wouldn’t do your current job for free, you’re in the wrong position.
The universe doesn’t need money, and it can easily create more. What it needs are things that money can’t buy.
Talent is created from obsession.
Digital assets provide downside protection in a service-based business.
Art transcends the impermanence of our existence and is the only thing that holds its value over time.
Train your subconscious to look for opportunities by turning “sell” decisions into “buy” decisions.
Good design exists in harmony with nature, and no one scales a product better and more efficiently than nature.
Asset vs. currency
Asset: From the Latin root satis meaning “enough”
Currency: From the Latin root curren meaning “flow”
The best way to distinguish between an asset and a currency is by visualizing an electrical circuit. An asset is like a battery. It produces a difference in potential, also known as voltage, that causes electrons to flow from one point to another. Curren(cy) is the charged particles, or the curren(t), that runs through the circuit. In the real world, people are assets. Desires create differences in potential that cause money to flow from person to person. Flow is created from desires being met.
The biggest enemy to nature is a vacuum. The bigger the void, the harder the universe works to fill it. Desires create vacuums that must eventually get filled.
We’ve heard of the importance of acquiring assets that produce cash flow like real estate or dividend stocks. The reason for that is that you cannot get rich by renting out your time. Assets are things that don’t require us to be alive in order to produce value. Books are an excellent example of this as they continue to shape and influence our culture long after their authors pass away.
Suppose you run an online marketing business. If you’re only getting paid every time you work on a project, it doesn’t matter what your rate is, you are still renting out your time. Without a strategy to convert the currency (liquid flow) into assets (currency attractors), you will find that time seems to run out a little faster each time you sit down to do work. This is because the universe is growing rapidly and exponentially, so unless we are using our time to make our time more valuable, it will feel like we don’t have as much time as we used to.
Studies on bacterial evolution show that organisms have the ability to “choose” the gene mutation that yields the best outcome in response to a dynamically changing environment, indicating that gene mutations may be more purposeful than random. Experiments in quantum physics show that we have a non-negligible influence on our environment by way of our consciousness. That means that not only are we evolving to meet the challenges imposed upon us by our environment, we are mutating our environment to create the necessary challenges that force us to evolve.
The good news is, whatever you’re producing in exchange for currency can be turned into a currency-producing asset. Suppose you’re a ghostwriter for rap artists. Instead of sending lyrics to the artist directly, you can publish the lyrics as an NFT (Non-Fungible Token) and program into it a royalty fee for resales. The artist can either burn the NFT (so that your work relationship stays a secret) or keep it and sell it at a higher price later on. Similarly, if you’re a lifestyle brand, the weekly emails you send out to clients can be turned into NFTs. Over time, you can build up a collection of newsletters that may be worth a lot of value in bulk because people enjoy collecting things that represent who they aspire to be (think vinyl records, comic books, Warhol paintings, etc).
Obsession is the talent
In the majority of our hustle-driven productivity culture, the emphasis is on acquiring skills rather than honing in on an obsession.
Casey Neistat, a YouTube vlogger who became famous for his cinematographic vlogs, will spend 40 minutes setting up the camera shots for a 2-second clip. Casey didn’t discover vlogging by learning how to use a camera; he figured out how to use a camera because of his obsession with storytelling.
Tarantino said that to make a good movie, you don’t actually have to know a lot about making movies because if you truly love film with all your heart and passion, you can’t help but make a good movie. Kobe had this to say about why he works the way he does:
“Those times when you get up early and you work hard, those times when you stay up late and you work hard, those times when you don't feel like working but you do it anyway - THAT is actually the dream.”
When obsession is present, the journey is the reward.
Chuck Palahniuk, author of the book Fight Club, said this in a podcast interview:
“And they say that when you’re really deep in a project, there is a sense that you’re so protected and so embraced by something that nothing bad can happen to you. You really feel like you’re just completely protected when you’re in the creative act. And when you’re not, you’re just completely anxious.”
Having experienced what it feels like to focus on something that deserves my undivided attention, it’s no wonder that much of our world is designed to separate us from that focus. I used to wonder why we would make a metaverse when we haven’t solved the problem of cellphone addiction, and I realized that it’s because we haven’t solved the problem of cellphone addiction that we have room for a metaverse. We should be guarding our focus like we guard our precious belongings. We should be ruthlessly selfish with our focus because whether we’re aware of it or not, we are telling the universe what we want every single second by where we place our awareness.
The Renaissance Period
“Web 2.0 companies convinced you to give away your creations in exchange for little hearts, but tell me how NFTs are the real scam.”
- Chris Dixon
If Web 1.0 was defined by search engines and Web 2.0 was defined by social media, Web 3.0 would be defined by the free, open, decentralized exchange known as the DeFi (Decentralized Finance) matrix.
Imagine if every asset could be measured against every other asset on every metric of performance imaginable. In the same way that Google indexed web pages, this data can be generated from indexing transactions from the Ethereum network. Like a game of fantasy football, the DeFi matrix is an optimization game where you get to leverage your unique creativity in building your dream team of assets.
NFTs, contrary to the popular belief that they are art, are actually computer code. That means that everything can be turned into an NFT - a block of your time, an exclusive membership, a lease on a house, etc. We’ve been indoctrinated by social media into thinking of content as disposable as opposed to ownable. As we transition from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0, ownership of digital assets is not only going to become more commonplace but a completely necessary strategy for every business. Companies will start issuing digital tokens that behave as derivative securities for their products (for example, Nike may issue digital tokens which can be exchanged for their sneakers in-store), and we will be able to trade those tokens on the decentralized exchanges.
In Web 2.0, when you buy a product, you’re buying a product. In Web 3.0, when you buy a product, you’re buying a piece of the company. Unlike the current stock market, the share price of a company will be determined by the public. Users will become owners, and purchase histories will become the new social media profiles. If people don’t believe in your company enough to own shares of it, they will be reluctant to purchase from you. In Web 2.0, sales and marketing can create revenue. In Web 3.0, the only thing that matters is how much people love your product. All the marketing will be done by customers. It’s capitalism at its finest.
Infinite supply of money
At the end of the day, gold is just debris from dead stars, fiat money is just a database entry, and cryptocurrency is just computer code.
The universe has a never-ending supply of currency, and it can easily create more. We see the manifestation of this in our world as the constant invention of new currencies, new financial instruments, and new ways to store and exchange value. While it is true that the total number of Bitcoins is finite, its purchasing power is infinite. The more goods we create and the more efficient we become at creating goods, the more things we can purchase with each unit of Bitcoin.
In the same way that the federal reserve can “print” money through open market operations, computer nerds can “write” money in the form of code that encapsulates some value function since as mentioned earlier, NFTs are just computer code. The reason why you should not work for money is because it is constantly being created out of thin air. The only constraint to the total amount of money in this universe is the magnitude of our imagination.
The universe wants what money can’t buy
Growth is mathematically programmed into the algorithm of the universe. What helps the universe grow is not money but rather all the things that money can’t buy - the things that are unique, that can only be created through the expression of some innate, God-given talent. As an example, even if someone else was given money to write this blog post, they wouldn’t be able to do it because they haven’t had the unique set of experiences I’ve had.
Unique assets are how we preserve our existence. Life goes by in the blink of an eye. Without leaving something behind that extends beyond our brief existence, once this incarnation is done, we will have nothing to show for it.
Everything is opportunity
There is a paper called “Selling fast buying slow” (titled after the Daniel Kahneman book “Thinking, Fast and Slow”) that studied the investment performance of top-notch, skilled investors. What they found was that while investors are reasonably good at making “buy” decisions - picking which stocks to buy, when to buy, and how much to buy, they performed much worse than random algorithms when it came to “sell” decisions - picking which stocks to sell, when to sell, and how much to sell. This inspired me to turn my “sell” decisions into “buy” decisions; instead of asking myself whether I should sell an asset, I would ask myself what I would buy with the cash value of the asset. An unexpected consequence of this practice is that it trained my subconscious to look for opportunities and as a result of such, gave me an appreciation for how much this universe has to offer.
Infinite potential exists in the space in-between solid matter. Creativity is the ability to collapse pure potentiality into a single desired outcome. The universe doesn’t give out punishments, only opportunities. Everything that happens to us is an opportunity, and whether we choose to accept it or not, the game continues to show us all the ways it wants to be played.
Owning your data
I recently had an issue with my Facebook apps not working due to a VPN problem. If I was paranoid, I’d say that Facebook was trying to censor me, but I’m not paranoid, so I won’t say that. The gift brought about by this incident was that it brought to my awareness how much of my workflow was reliant on a single company’s technology, which I have since then revised. I always advocate for doing regular exports of your social media data and making sure that you have multiple points of failure when it comes to the services you use on a daily basis, and that includes financial services. You should be running your life like you’re running a billion-dollar company - by putting in place systems and structures that serve and protect you.
Why I’m comfortable going to zero
I have absolute faith in nature’s ability to restore itself back to balance. As Jordan Peterson puts it, “You can’t twist the fabric of reality without having it snap back.” Every energetic reverberation we send eventually makes its way back into our current reality.
As mentioned at the beginning, nature doesn’t like voids. When you empty yourself by giving all you’ve got, nature works surreptitiously to refill your cup.
Good design exists in harmony with nature, hence the term “organic” growth. When a product is in alignment with nature, that product gets an inheritance from nature’s infinite bank of resources.
I view my wealth similar to how I view my life. I am not the owner but rather a conduit of it. It is not for me; it simply wants to come through me. I love this quote from artist and podcaster Ramin Nazer when asked to comment on whether he thought the world owed him: “Absolutely not. The world owes me nothing. I am borrowing its atoms right now.”
I’m comfortable going to zero because I know that I living on borrowed time. Everything I have is on loan from the universe. I keep none of it at the end, and I don’t get to decide when that end will come. All I’ve got is the opportunity in front of me. The only thing I can do is to make the most of the time I have, and if that means that I get to put all my energy and focus towards things that are important, then I am the luckiest person in the world.
