Some time ago I wrote a story about my past experiences with technology and possibly a few regrets as to how I reacted and acted upon new technological innovations. Some things were destined to go the way of the dinosaur. Take a VHS tape for example. It was an effective technology and did what it needed to do but it was big and clunky and it seems to just be the nature of technology that it is destined to become faster and smaller and more robust as human beings continue to solve complex problems that result in advancement.
In an article I wrote and published on my blog about 6 months ago, I told readers about my past and the fact that when I was younger I didn't know much about business. As a student in highschool it seemed that CD's were still fairly new and CD burning technology was state-of-the-art.
My parents had an Apple Macintosh computer but I remember our family moving completely over to PCs so clearly Apple was having hard times. It wasn't until I was in community college that Amazon and Ebay had become to gain name recognition. But really with all this technology and all the opportunity that was being presented almost on a daily basis, I had no clue or perhaps no desire to benefit from any of these new technological changes taking place to society. Thinking about it the desire was there, the understanding of all these technologies and what I needed to do to be a part of this change taking place wasn't...
Really, what does a high school kid from an inter-city school know about the future? I mean a normal high school student, not one of those odd cases of a 15 year old winning the nobel prize or creating their own tech startup. Just a normal kid...
Nowadays it has probably changed but back in my youth if I had known what to have done, I'd have been a millionaire.
In the past article I wrote on this topic I added to some of those thoughts I just shared above with this:
In college I studied business and I read a book called 'Rich dad, Poor dad.' We often make excuses for our ignorance and I remember saying to myself, well, the reason you haven't made it yet is cause you never had a rich dad. Its too easy to make excuses, its much harder to take responsibility for your actions and act on your gut instincts. I remember in high school telling my parents to buy Amazon stock. They shrugged it off thinking, what does a high school kid know about stocks? Later I pushed them to buy some Ebay. If I used it and everybody I knew used it, wouldn't it be worth buying?
What can I learn from this? Listen to the youth, they know what's cool, they can sometimes be much more connection to the change taking place or have a better understanding of where all of it is going... We can't make excuses for our lack of accomplishment. We literally have the power to do what we want if we have a clear goal and we constantly make efforts to reach it!
I sound like a broken record repeating stories about these missed opportunities I should have taken and regrets I hold about not playing it great in the past. Honestly, the healing has been taking place and will continue to take place as I keep this perspective and look towards the future.
After university I went to a friend's house and saw his Ipod touch for the first time. I had never seen anything like it!
This Ipod touch was like nothing I had ever seen! It was going to completely transform our world into a new age of personal technology. It had a touchscreen and had games and it simply blew all other handheld devices out of the water.
I remember thinking that it was the future, I knew it would become a phone like no other phone ever seen before but I couldnt put two and two together and say, hey, I can ride the wave, I'm going to give all my money to Apple and load the boat on Apple stock!
It was the future but I just didn't act upon it and be part of the future with it. I've learned that if you know the river is changing course, we must put ourselves in the way of it if it is necessary to completing our goal. If it can help you reach your goal you must take action and you have to be ready to ride the wave!
Enter Bitcoin... I heard about this thing in about 2010 and even made an effort to get my hands on some. When I figured out that it was extremely difficult to buy and that it couldnt simply be stored on your computer but you actually needed some ungodly long code that gave you access to it, my mind shut down for some reason, I told myself it was too difficult and that it would never work. If I had a better understanding of history and truly understood what it was, I would have bought as much of it as I possibly could have. Another missed opportunity.
Bitcoin, cryptocurrency and blockchain technology offers an opportunity to those who choose to act upon it. It is a disruptive technology that will form the foundation of a new smart economy. Decentralization has the potential to replace centralization and value can be transferred with much less wastage as opposed to today's central bank fiat money system.
Steemit and Steem offer another amazing opportunity which has completely transformed my idea of value and how communities can create value together. Steemit is a social network, powered by blockchain which operates at 100,000TPS allowing writers and content creators the ability to get paid for simply posting their work. This is shockingly cool! I still believe to this day even with EOS on the horizon that Steem is a game-changer and the largest platform Steemit which sits on top of it is pretty darn impressive for what it is, especially considering its still in BETA.
Cryptocurrencies like Steem are the future. Blockchain is the future. A disruptive paradigm shift is taking place, I can see it, and in fact this time I am a part of it and if you are reading this, you are too. Enough said, welcome to the future, happy you've made it this far! The time is now... Don't sit on the sidelines... Act!
Thanks for reading! Thoughts and comments are appreciated.
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