Every now and then I come across a story about someone describing their regret for not investing in the Blockchain earlier. The internet of things they call it, they describe it as investing in the internet back in the day, and they wish they'd invested early... As if it was too late already.
I don't know if you've noticed but these kinds of stories have been quite frequent lately. Especially in the recent weeks.
And every time I come across one of those, I immediately start to process that inescapable feeling that pops up anytime I read a story, or watch a video in the same lines.
Maybe it’s the feeling of fear, not the fear of action but the fear of missing out. Maybe
F.U, FOMO!
My brain, by nature - maybe yours too - tries to construct scenarios that rewrite the actual story in a more favorable way to avoid the discomfort that comes with regret, thus disguising it under a more pleasant memory.
Say for example you had the chance to invest in Bitcoin early on and you didn’t take it. Then a few years later you would feel some sort of regret, would you not?
Then in that case, there’s this phenomenon that takes place where you start to imagine a brand new scenario where you did invest early on, and as a consequence you’re in a much better situation now. It’s a really nice feeling.
The problem is that the phone rings and wakes you up from that day-dream.
I call that phenomenon Time Travelling.
Here's the thing, there are no do-overs. There is no insert coins moment. But there’s good news still.
Because it’s not too late, far from it in fact.
There are several other opportunities in the market, as there are other cryptocurrencies that are destined for the same growth than BTC (or maybe even more), including the amazing STEEM which I will get to at the end of this post.
But let’s go back to regret and time-travel for a second.
Stuck Between Fomo and Time Travel
While time-travelling is an excellent way to sooth the temporary pain of regret, it still fails to tackle the root of the problem. In fact, it might just guarantee you the same outcome every time by having you never learning from your past mistakes.
But even with that in mind, is it easy to get rid of?
In an ideal world, I'd would love to tell you that the minute I realized how counterproductive time-travel is, I said never again and stopped doing it.
In the real world however, breaking habits often turns out to be much easier said than done.
One way is to resist, that would be the hard way. And it would require constant efforts and discipline.
Another way is to pull a Sun Tzu and use the opponent's strength against itself.
So instead for resisting time-travel all together, why not travel to the future and compare both scenarios, one with the cost of action, and one with the cost of inaction.
Yes, Fomo might kick in, sure. But Fomo can also be a powerful tool if used correctly.
Be on the Right Side of Time
I like to remind myself sometimes of a story that Gary Vaynerchuk recounts about how a few years ago he was trying to convince a huge mega-franchise called Blockbuster to purchase a little crazy thing called Netflix, for a not so great sum of money.
Their response was a little bit like this: We’ll pass.
Why? One can speculate but a case can be made that perhaps they didn’t see the new trend coming.
Now, looking at what Netflix represents today in relationship to a few millions at the beginning of a gigantic trend, it becomes clear that they missed on a hell of deal.
If I were in that room, I bet I'll be time-travelling right now.
With blockchain tech, the same thing seems to be underway, we are now at the very beginning of a trend that is set to disrupt several markets in the years to come.
The world is changing fast, there’s no denying that, and it will change even faster as we hit the bell curve, so you either move fast or the wave passes you by.
Riding the Third Wave
Meanwhile, the politicians will probably just keep pretending that a decentralized peer to peer economy is just some sort of a hippie fantasy that will fade away once the teenagers grow up decide to go back to state controlled monopolies.
Look around, the largest real estate company has no buildings, the biggest transportation company has no cars, the largest retailer in the world has no stores…
More money is leaving each year from TV advertising to Youtube and social media influencers as the attention economy is shifting rapidly.
Not only Elvis has left the building, but his impersonators died of old age.
The best thing is, steem has the best of both worlds, an efficient cryptocurrency and blockchain, AND a social media site for the attention economy.
As far as I’m concerned, there’s only one thing left to say:
Steem on my friends!
