Last week, I introduced David Foster Wallace and his ideas to us. Particularly, I promised to share how those ideas can help us have a better career, life and relationship. 

The overarching idea that came out of the speech was that for a lot of us, we act based on our default thinking state. We do not take the extra step first to be aware of our thinking state, secondly to choose how we think and lastly to choose what we think about. We just think whatever comes to our mind.

Here’s a good example given by Wallace:

Let’s say it’s an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home. You haven’t had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work, you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the work day and the track is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be but you can’t just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store’s confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts. Eventually, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough check-out lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, lottery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour trac, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But if you are reading this and it hasn’t been your experience, soon it will be your actual life routine, day per week per month per year. Or in another variant. 

It will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. 

Because the trac jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

Or, of course, if I’m in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day trac being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUVs and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. (This is an example of how NOT to think, though). And I can think about how our children’s children will despise us for wasting all the future’s fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on. 

If you read through the example you will see the frustration of typical adult life. If you are living in Lagos, you might have it even worse. Amidst this frustration is room to think and what we think at that time matters. Transcending our default thinking state is how we make our life better, our career eventful and our relationships perfect.

If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do anyway. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn’t have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It’s the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities.

The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this trac, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it’s not impossible that some of these people in SUVs have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.

Again, please don’t think that I’m giving you moral advice, or that I’m saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it’s hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won’t be able to do it, or you just flat out won’t want to.

You can see things differently

But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends on what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down. 

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.

And this my friends is how we can have a better career, life and relationship.

That when you realise that you are not enjoying your work, you do not result in default thinking that your manager is against you and all your colleagues are ganged up against you. Rather, that maybe they aren’t just enjoying it as well or that they are even having it worse than you.

When your girlfriend doesn’t call you, your first imagination isn’t to assume the worst but to think about the 101 legitimate reasons that might have caused that. And that allows you to give an attentive ear when she tries to explain to you about the situation.

Or when you are stuck in that long unfriendly traffic and you have all the time on earth to think. You do not revert to assuming it’s all about you. The Danfo driver is blocking you. He may just be trying to meet a sales target that might mean her daughter and son are not sent out of school or that her wife gets to buy that fine Ankara for the weekend occasion.

As David Foster Wallace noted, all these alternate thinking need not be necessarily true just as your default thinking isn’t necessarily true. The most important thing is that you are aware of your state of thinking and consciously choose the empowering one. Not one that makes your otherwise frustrating day even more frustrating.

For far too often, we have all resorted to a default thinking state where we assume all things are about us and we are the centre of the universe. And how well has that served you? Have you lived the best life with that thinking state? How about having the best career? Did you have the best relationship by always thinking that way? I bet that no matter your answer to those questions, you could be better if you updated your thinking state from default to one of more awareness. And choose how you think and what you think. 

In a similar vein to this conversation, I engaged in a conversation on Twitter last weekend on the same subject. See here:

https://twitter.com/davidalade__/status/1545775998100295681?s=21

And follow up here:

https://twitter.com/davidalade__/status/1545860382723555331?s=21

2 years ago, I looked at my library and new books were nearly non-existent. It has been a while since I bought new books. So I decided I was going to take a large chunk of money to fill my library. I budgeted N100,000. I was on a trip and made a stop in OAU Ile-Ife, my alma mater, where I was sure my budget will get well utilised.

As I picked one book after the other, I ended up spending only 70% of my budget. But that meant a lot of books to carry back to Lagos. I was happy about the books and my library looked full once I arranged all the books in it. But is the essence of a library just to look full? I am sure you will agree with me that the answer to that is no.

Before I left Nigeria, I am not sure if I read up to 25% of the books. I am in the UK now and once again, I have started collecting books. Stacking up my libraries again with books on different topics and genres. Will I read them all? I don’t know.

But something usually happens when you have more books in your library than you can possibly read. One, you are never in lack of what to read. You can only be in lack of motivation or time to read them. And that removes an important impediment to reading for anyone who practices this.

A few years ago I used to go all out to encourage people to read. One of the frequent questions I get is what should they read? Well, if you have more books than you can possibly read, then that is no longer a question.

Another benefit of having more books than you can read is that you are able to pick any topic that meets your immediate need. Recently, I wanted to learn more about how to harness the power of the mind. I have about 5 books answering the question in a different manner. I picked one of them that happened to be highly recommended. Unfortunately, as I typed I am still on it, not yet finished. Fortunately, I have more than one. So I picked another that was gifted to me. I finished that one within 3 days and it addressed my needs exactly as it fits me. 100%. I was so grateful.

Now here’s the most important reason in my opinion. Occasionally, you can stumble on a book (existing within your library) that will alter the cause of your life for good. Out of interest to find the next good read, you could potentially pick one from your library. And what you read from it (and it doesn’t matter whether you read all or not) can be the reason why your life changed for good. I say this because I have experienced this kind of thing in my life in a far too significant way to discount it.

Having more books in your library than you can possibly read is like having more food in your storehouse than you can possibly eat. There’s wisdom in that. It means you don’t have to go shopping whenever you need to eat, it means you can have any mixture of food anytime you need it and it means you could eat whatever gives you maximum health per time.

That’s why I encourage everyone to have more books available to them to read than they can possibly read at any moment.

The first step to all significant progress is a firm belief in yourself that you can do it. I always like it when that belief is trending toward being delusional about what you are capable of.

The more faith you have in your ability to triumph no matter what, the more progress you will make in life. It’s more like a natural law.

You do yourself a lot of disservices and deprive the world of the wonders that lie in you when you don’t believe in yourself and what you are capable of.

Often, the only thing standing between you and your full potential is the discipline to fixate on a spot until you have developed. But alas, the mirage of distraction that locks around is so compelling that you will rather entertain them than disciplining yourself to do what’s most important.

I found a quote in a book I’m currently reading that’s got me thinking ever since.

“…I know this pathway [the pathway of truth] looks barren at its commencement (truth always does, it is only error and delusion which are at first inviting and fascinating,) but if you undertake to walk it; if you perseveringly discipline your mind, eradicating your weaknesses, and allowing your soul-forces and spiritual powers to unfold themselves, you will be astonished at the magical changes which will be brought about in your outward life.”

The pathway of truth always looks barren at the beginning. It always feels like I am doing the reading but I can’t feel I am getting better, or I am learning the skill but I have still not gotten to where I wanted to be, or I am applying the pressure but it seems as if I have remained in the same spot since I started. Hence, the illusion of barrenness. Yes, it’s an illusion because in the real sense when you follow the path of truth (discipline, focus and virtue), you are like a planted seed. And like all seeds, you must die first before you can rise again. Again, it’s a natural law.

Before you can see the result of your self-belief in your outward life, time will pass, sacrifices will be made and you might even be ridiculed. But as with all natural phenomena, you will rise far above your greatest imagination if you stay on the path. And when nothing else seems to be working for you, it is also your self-belief alone that can come to the rescue.

Self-belief is so important that without it, you can do nothing.

When I gained admission into the university I was hardly the reading type. That habit was good enough to get me through secondary school but obviously wouldn’t get me anywhere in the University. So I failed my first semester in year one. However, I was surrounded by those who had between 4.6 and 5 out of 5. Immediately, I told myself that if they can do it, there is nothing to stop me from doing it as well. All it will take is that I read more and more. And that was what I did. I believed in myself enough to think I am as good as the best in the class. And that was all I needed; a belief.

Was I as good as them academically? In retrospect, I don’t think so. But what does it matter? That belief propelled me to give it more effort, and more discipline and I came out triumphant.

Until you have it in you, it cannot come out of you. What you have within is what you can manifest without.

Always note that.

I like to say that what you believe doesn’t have to be true. Yes, it doesn’t. Just like my belief about being as good as the best wasn’t empirically true.

What you believe only needs to be useful and sufficient as a propellant to catapult you to the manifestation of the best version of yourself.

In the past couple of days, I have been doing something. In my journal, I write again and again about how proud I am of myself. Yes, I am proud of myself.

Because I have said that a lot of times, I have so much now believe in myself that I wake up every morning with the mentality that I can not disappoint myself in this pursuit. So I am fired up to crush it. And crushing, I do it daily. It all starts from within.

I know you might have been wounded a lot, failed so much and attempted far too many times that you have lost all your self-belief and all that’s left within you is nothing but self-doubt and self-condemnation at the worst. Life can be cruel. I am sorry.

Yet, the only way to get yourself out and give yourself yet another fighting chance is to believe once again in the hero in you. Awaken the dreamer boy/girl in you and ascend. How can you do that? Let me take a stab at offering some options.

How can you increase self-belief?

What I have found from extensive observation and much studying is that lack of success is the biggest killer of self-belief.

You tried something but failed to have a good result. You gave your best to prepare for something but you still didn’t meet the cut-off. You look back at your journey and you can’t point to a few things that have worked for you. All you can see is a failure and more failures and even more failures. Then something starts to whisper within you… 

It says things like maybe you are not that good enough. Oh no, maybe you are not good at all. Oh no, maybe the universe has even conspired against you and your effort can’t ever change that. You try to fight that thought but every data point that you can look back to seems to agree with the whispers. And so you can only fight for so long and now, you have agreed with those whispers. You have agreed that you can not do it, that it’s not meant for you, and that your effort doesn’t count any more than your beliefs matter.

Last week and this week have been one of the best I’ve had in a long time. It’s one of those weeks I would rate 5/5. Perfecto!!!

But what was different about the week and how is it relevant to the rejuvenation of your self-belief?

I started doing something different. I set up each day in a way that I will start with success with at least one thing. You see if lack of success is the killer of self beliefs, one can as well engineer success in their day to boost self-belief. And that’s what I did.

I have set up a schedule that means when I wake up in the morning I accomplish a thing or a few things. Once I accomplish those few things, I allow myself to think very well about what a great success I’ve just heard. I tell myself then that I can’t let go of this feeling so I must complete every other thing I’ve set to do today as well. And I go on to do them. Every one of them with great strength and a delusional belief that no matter what I have set on my to-do list, I will do them. The result is that you have a David Alade who is ever more confident in his abilities.

Don’t think those early morning things are a big deal. Well, I have programmed my mind to think of them as a big deal but they may not necessarily be. Here they are…

(1.) I pray when I wake up. I don’t usually do this every day but I want to and I know it is easy to do.

(2.) I do some 5 minutes of exercise.

(3.) I study for one hour and

(4) I will write for another one hour.

Those are things that matter to me and are easy to do early in the morning for me to be able to record initial successes. You need to find what matters to you and is easy to accomplish as well. Do them first early in the morning. Start your day with a story of success, think about what success you just had and you will see how effective that can be at rejuvenating your self-belief.

This will work, believe me. But also remember that the nature of truth is that it is barren at commencement. Eventually though, like the seed planted by a riverside, it will flourish and living water will flow out of it.

That’s how I do mine. It’s not the only way though. But whatever way you employ to rejuvenate your self-belief, I know for certain that it has to include ensuring that you have deliberate successes built into your day. If what kills self-belief is a lack of success, then an abundance of success should awaken it. I wish you a constant awakening!

In 2018 when I was seeking my first job post-NYSC, I ended up having job offers for 3 different roles. One was an Investment Banking position, another was a Cybersecurity position which I later changed to Data and Analytics and the last was for a Project Finance position.

For the initiated, you will know that each of those 3 roles requires a completely different set of skills to thrive in them. Does that mean I have all the skills? Or how come I have offers in the three areas? The answer to this question lies at the heart of this article.

I later changed my Cybersecurity offer to data and analytics where I worked with ambitious organisations to transform their data assets and worked with them to realise their data ambitions. Because of my experience, people often reach out to me to ask for advice on how to also switch to Data and Analytics. Granted, I am in a good place to share insights. However, their premise for coming to me is often always wrong and that’s what I tend to always set right first before an even more extensive conversation.

Today even though I work within the data space, there are still some data jobs that I wouldn’t apply for. And if I did, I won’t be surprised if I don’t get feedback from the recruiters. Why is that? How come the same person that got offered three jobs in completely different industries and functional areas cannot even get a job with his similar competence today? 

It’s simple, today, I exist on a different benchmark than I was 4 years ago.

How your benchmark affects the opportunities you attract and its place when you are transitioning career 

4 years ago when I was applying for those jobs, all that was required of me was my university degree, evidence of some level of interest in those areas and the ability to tell my story on an interview panel. Plus, the interview at that stage had a different goal. It wasn’t to assess my technical capability, rather it was to see if the hiring manager is comfortable hiring me notwithstanding my probably zero knowledge of the technicalities of the job. Simply put, it was an entry-level job and zero knowledge is assumed for nearly all entry-level jobs.

For such jobs, you are then expected to go through some onboarding training and continue learning on the job. In fact, in your first year, you likely will not be held responsible for any material contribution. When I joined PwC, we were told that we can make all our mistakes in year one and all sorts. Essentially, the expectations then are different. It was the bare minimum.

That’s what I meant by my benchmark. On a scale of expectation, there was zero on me then. It explains why I would get Investment Banking, Cybersecurity and Project Finance positions in the same period. 

As someone transitioning to a new career or say switching careers, your reality will be different from mine. You are switching most likely at the end of your entry-level, middle or late stage. All jobs at that level would require that you bring some experience if not near perfect experience to the table. An experience that as a switcher, you are likely not to have. Then it becomes tough to navigate. Some people grow frustrated at this point.

You need to think about it this way though. If you needed someone in your team as well as a senior or manager or director, would you prefer someone with the perfect experience for the role or another with zero experience for the role? I have used perfect and zero as the extreme example here deliberately. And I can imagine that 9.5 out of 10 times, you will prefer someone with the perfect experience. “I’ve done it before” is easier to sell than “I am passionate about this and can do it.” You are the latter in this scenario.

The task for you is to bridge the gap between zero experience to some experience since it would be impossible to have the perfect experience until you actually have the job.

Can we call what I had a career switch?

People consider it a career switch because I studied Accounting and now I am doing Data and Analytics. 

Yes, we can call it a switch and it is indeed a switch. But in the hierarchy of switching difficulties, I switched when it was easiest. I did so when expectations from me were near zero. 

Understand the stage of career that you are

Here, I’ve given my idea about different stages and the ease of switching based on what would be expected of you.

Entry-level:– easiest to switch because of assumed zero knowledge for nearly all jobs and only a few expectations. Please be aware that zero-knowledge doesn’t mean you should not attempt. Towards the end of my Investment banking interview, the MD said “we are looking for who to train but you seem to know it all.” That’s to tell you the kind of preparation I did and the impression I left.

Senior Level:- here, the least that’s expected of you is the core technical knowledge of your functional area and industry. My advice is to try as much as possible not to make a functional switch here. The reason is that you need to deepen your technical skills well and you are likely not to have done that yet. However, if you feel confident there is nothing more to learn or altogether it’s not even a part for you, then, by all means, move. And it’s fine to move industries. You can still leverage your technical skills. Data Science in Google for instance is very likely to be different from Data Science in Dangote Cement. About the difficulty, this is probably the toughest in my opinion. 

Manager level:- you own technical skills already and that’s out of the question. People skills, business development skills, sales and so on are the additions here. I will say it’s easier to switch at this stage compared to the two stages above. All the soft skills here can be immediately utilised in another functional area where your technical skills may not be relevant.

Top management level:- Director, C-Suites etc: where network, vision and people management is the most important things. Few people get to this stage and want to switch careers. But for those who wish to, I’d like to believe it is somewhat easier for them as well. They have a lot to bring to the table and no one would require them to be hands-on. More leadership.

There’s more to know about navigating career switch

The inspiration to write this article came after someone asked me the question of switching careers again. I get the question a lot. While working on this article, the research that I did produced close to 10,000 words. This article is just about 1,000 words. Imagine what you will get from 10,000 words. The content is a rich one filled with some intuitive and counterintuitive nuggets, guides and principles and strategies and blueprints. I am compiling it into an e-book already. I expect it to be ready in a matter of weeks. More details later. 

I wrote here without any doubt that the future that is possible is that given the right regulatory environment, every organisation that can, will offer their version of Stablecoins.

It is not difficult to foresee this outcome. The infrastructure of Stablecoin works is scalable and accessible to a wider audience. Therefore introducing new dynamics to all payment business models. And has it us often said, “every technology company eventually becomes a fintech company”. The reason why that is the case is that every company facilitates payment. Especially those in the B2C market.

In not so surprising news, “US Banks Form Group to Offer USDF Stablecoin“.

Yes, banks have seen it. They also know that the SWIFT system that they formed together many years ago is no longer as efficient for the coming disruption. They know that to grow the Fees and Commission line of the Profit/Loss statement they need to rethink payment.

As I also noted in the quoted piece, consumers don’t need to worry. The worry is for the innovators, entrepreneurs and business leaders. Because for the consumer, they will always win whenever the arrow of technological progress flies in a forward direction.

My mama can rejoice more because a time is coming when sending those dollars home wouldn’t be a stress for me again. And when she needs to pay those dollar school fees she wouldn’t need to worry about where the dollars will come from. A wallet will be available to anyone who wants it. Just as anyone who can, will offer a stablecoin.

I have been spending an inordinate amount of time reading about the payment and the banking industry. You might have noticed that in what I have been sharing.

When Satoshi launched Bitcoin after the financial crisis, he labelled it as a fix for the inefficient system that existed then and persists till today. What I am not sure Satoshi might have foreseen is that the technology he helped assemble would be used for something far more than just Bitcoin alone.

Importantly, Stablecoins and CBDC have been birthed as a result of the technology. So what’s going to likely happen from here?

1. With the news of PayPal plans to launch its stablecoin, it won’t be wild to say everyone that can launch a stablecoin will launch one in the future. Facebook opened everyone’s eyes and the existing stablecoins have proven that operating within a given regulatory framework, Stablecoins are the future.

2. Payment infrastructure over the next decade will experience a massive revamp. More than 80% of the world’s central banks are doing great one thing other about CBDC. Stablecoins are not only garnering attention, but the possible number of uses cases for them are also growing at an alarming rate. Those two systems are infrastructure redefining mechanisms of coordinating money.

3. Existing systems won’t go out of extinction overnight. What we will experience is that startups will build on these rails before legacy corporations. Also, adoption will first of all be high in countries that are currently suffering from financial alienation, high inflation and an unstable economy.

4. Regulation will struggle to catch up at first and that may be costly. But that’s the price of innovation. Like everything else though, eventually, regulation will be close par.

5. Africa in particular will be the most important ground for experimentation in this new era.

It’s an interesting time to be alive and witness this. I have used Stablecoins to facilitate a lot of my cross-border payments in the last couple of months. It’s inevitable after all.

I shared 5 important lessons of the year in the last newsletter. I left one out which I will quickly talk about now.

Never self-reject. Never!!!

And I am guilty of this just as much as any other person might. But I’ve learnt to take leaps despite my feeling of “not enough”.

Let me remind you of my story.

In 2018 as I wrapping up my NYSC, PwC job application came out. I chose not to apply and self rejected myself because I thought I am not good enough to work at PwC. A friend encouraged me to apply and I did. I didn’t only get the job, I was a top performer all of my time with the firm.

Since I joined PwC, I determined to leave in 2021. I believed I would have had enough. When the time came, I chose not to apply for some opportunities because I thought I wasn’t qualified. I later took a leap of faith and applied to my surprise, my assessors believed I am qualified and I got 2 job offers in that period. And I took the job offer from London.

It’s so easy to self-reject. That feeling of inadequacy, I’m not enough and it’s not for my type hunts a lot of us.

But I am here today to tell you to start perishing that thought. You are enough, in fact, more than enough. And if anyone would tell you that you are not enough for an opportunity, let that person better not be you. Let it come from an external party. And when it comes, don’t believe it. They just can’t see how enough you are yet.

I interviewed with Dangote in 2020. The interview was before GMDs of about 5 units. In the middle of the interview, the head of HR had to stop and ask about my age. I told them and she responded, “you are a brilliant young man”.

I didn’t get the job because of some obvious reasons but that was a real confidence booster for me. I became a “friend” with the GMD of the unit that wanted to recruit me. Sometimes, that’s what you gain from some interviews, a confidence booster. But if I’d rejected myself, that also won’t be there.

As you go into 2022, it is extremely important that you have this idea at the back of your mind. The idea is that you will never self-reject yourself for any opportunity again.

You must also do your work. Never be found wanting. Be diligent. Whatever and I mean “whatever” your hand finds to do, do it with all your might whether someone is watching or not. And most importantly when no one is watching. If you’ve done so, you will have more self-confidence and self-respect and it will be difficult to self-reject.

Cryptocurrency is nascent and hot at the moment. I expect the hotness to continue for another 10 years at the minimum.

Within these 10 years, great wealth will be made by those who understand the trend and play along or those who just got lucky. That’s one part of the story of the next 10 years.

The other part of the story that is most beckoning to me is what would need to happen to enable people to make wealth.

What’s happening with cryptocurrency economically is not new. Right from the foundation of the earth, every technological breakthrough has always created more wealth. Because such breakthroughs either usher in a new economic reality or optimize existing reality.

Either way, what happens is a reduction in friction in how we coordinate as a people. And unavoidably the wealth pie gets expanded.

I read a fascinating account of how the development of maps helped Britain to win battles, conquer nations, and expanded its territory. All on the shoulder of a simple science of navigation.

But hey, you don’t need to go as far back as the 15th century to know this. Just take a moment to contemplate how much wealth the mobile phone in your hand has created in the world and you will start to understand how wealth is inevitable over the next decade.

However, it’s not bad for us to travel as far back as necessary in history to drive home a point.

Life in a state of nature as described by Thomas Hobbs was brutish, nasty, short, and poor. In such a state, humans existed in a small cluster of few recognizable families and an outsider is often seen as an enemy. Also, those small families cultivated “everything” that they needed for survival.

As our population grew, it became glaring that such a state is unsustainable. And we started to coordinate together in larger communities. The first mode of economic cooperation that we could think of was to exchange goods for goods (the barter system). Soon enough, the inefficiency of that system became obvious as well. And we sort a more sustainable way to coordinate.

Our search led us to the discovery of different forms of technology; a way to preserve our goods, a way to protect our territory, a way to better exchange economic values and most importantly a way to ensure our survival.

In all of our searches and discoveries, a common denominator is that we are always moving towards a more efficient and sustainable life. Efficient and sustainable could mean cheaper, faster, better, timely and so on.

That’s the lesson of history.

The question is why do some of us believe Crypto is the next phase of this endless iteration of efficiency and sustainability? It’s simple and may not be so simple as well.

The answer lies at the bottom of the promise of blockchain technology. But it can be obviously found on the promise page of each crypto asset built on it.

Bitcoin is poised to create more wealth 

First, Bitcoin. It promises a better way to exchange economic value, accumulate wealth and preserve wealth.

The first question to ask is, is there anything wrong with the way we are doing those things at the moment? The answer is simply yes, there’s something wrong with it. So what’s it?

After a lot of iteration, we settled on government-issued money as the best way to coordinate economically. The choice of government money came in after considering some factors (durability, portability, divisibility, uniformity, scarcity and acceptability).

While I can’t dig deep here into each of these factors, I must say that the choice of how we organize economically must put them all into consideration before we arrive at a solution. Yet, history has taught us that of all the factors, there’s one that can’t be sacrificed and that is SCARCITY.

From the times of batter until now, we’ve had to give up a factor in favour of another so that we can organize economically. But not once in that long history have we settled on sacrificing scarcity among the factors. That’s because it’s the most important factor.

Now, agreeing to organize economically under the arrangement of government-issued money was on a condition of controlled scarcity (you can call it inflation at this point). Inflation is simply a measure of how much more scarce or less scarce this instrument of economic coordination has become. 

If it becomes less scarce, it means those that hold it becomes poorer (their wealth declines) and if it becomes more scarce, those who hold it become wealthier.

In recent years, for an oftentimes understandable reason, it has become less scarce. That’s the phenomenon of rising inflation and the continued printing of money that we’ve been talking about. And the way it’s trending, there’s no stop in sight and it’s a downward sloppy trend.

That’s what Bitcoin aims to fix. By imposing the most important factor, SCARCITY (21 million units), under a predetermined “less and more scare (halving)” policy (monetary).

The expectation as with every other breakthrough technology is that as the world adopts it, global wealth will increase and those who were early adopters (believers) will be some of those who benefited the most from the wealth.

By the way, new technology brings in more wealth simply because it expands the scope of commerce through the creation of new lines of commerce or increased efficiency in the existing lines of commerce. Bitcoin in this case makes cross border payment more seamless than fiat.

Money exists before and so what Bitcoin is doing is increasing efficiency and sustainability. The easiest to understand use case here is how a lot of people have used Bitcoin to seamlessly facilitate cross border payment. For institutions, they are big on the store of value use case.

The world supercomputer is also creating more wealth

The promise of Ethereum on the other hand is not as straightforward and a bit complicated.

But here’s it: it promises to be the world’s supercomputer. Now, trust me that’s vague and even I still struggle a lot to understand what it means by “world’s supercomputer”. Yet, we are also bullish on it because it promises a more efficient and sustainable paradigm. And as with any technology that promises such, they always create a wealthier future if they achieve their aim. So let’s break the Ethereum promise down a bit more from the vague Supercomputer.

Decentralized Finance (Defi) Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). Three of the most popular use cases that Ethereum has enabled on our quest for a better, more efficient and sustainable society.

Just as I explained under Bitcoin, the first question is what’s wrong with the existing system as in the case of Defi and DAOs. Simply put, while the existing systems have been working so far, the believers behind these use cases believe that it can be better. And they have shown this with on-chain data (incorruptible data).

In the case of NFTs, it is the creation of a new paradigm. It is creating a way to originally own digital assets just as you can own physical assets. Before NFTs, infinite replicability makes it hard to know an original digital property and who owns the original. So largely, no one even cares to. But that is fast-changing and in the first half of 2021 alone, NFT has generated a direct sale of up to $2.5 billion. 

To bring this to an end, I and others who are keeping a close tab on crypto innovation see these and more and that’s why we are extremely optimistic about the future and the resultant wealth creation that would happen.

Seriously, I have no doubt.

Invest. Bet on the future with me. Build wealth.