Opportunities often masquerade as challenges, waiting for even the unskilled to recognize their potential. As Pasteur said, "Chance favors the prepared mind," but serendipity ensures that success can find those who are ready to learn and adapt, regardless of initial skill.
Being in the right place at the right time is often all you need. My path is unconventional, to say the least, but it can be emulated by anyone reading this.
A Brief History
To provide context, we first need to understand why you can move forward and be instrumental in building the next big product or even industry. My previous experience is not the type that would be on the resumes of my peers in the crypto industry. It spans a variety of skilled and unskilled labor, from making snow in negative 45 degrees Celsius in the Rocky Mountains to building automated rail solutions in the very isolated Pilbara region in 45 degrees Celsius heat. In 2017, I didn’t even know what HTML was (don’t laugh).
Through the Eyes of the Beholder
Many successful people attribute their success, at least in part, to luck. From the outside, it seems like alchemy or magic, but this perception is due to the observer not directly experiencing the inordinate amount of hardship, depression, self-doubt, rejection, hope, faith, and exuberance that this luck consists of.
Recently, while watching the Netflix documentary "Dirty Pop", it was revealing how the reality of some of the largest boy bands in the world and the image I had stored in my memory were vastly different parallel universes. Subjectivity was the barrier. While I had a prefabricated image of these bands from their later years, I would never know what existed prior and during, behind the scenes. For the members of the Backstreet Boys, their experience was just another gig. They were plucked for a job and linked up with other people they knew from their present or past. In the early days, they were chauffeured around in a bus and floated by their producer around high schools, performing for teenagers. A wild ride ensued, and they became some of the biggest names in the world but ultimately never received adequate compensation and were pawns in a giant Ponzi scheme.
But for an outsider or a professional in the early days, they likely would have balked at the idea of working 24/7 for no wage or little wage. From early footage, it was not evident they would become worldwide stars. It’s likely the boys thought very differently about this. Perhaps they had no other options, or they believed in the mission.
The fact remains that most would not have been in the right place, had the energy, or the foolishness to capitalize on the opportunity because, at that stage, the opportunity didn’t exist.
Proof of What?
Three years later, from not knowing HTML, I had moved to a different country, learned enough about computer science to be dangerous, and lost the majority of my initial investment in crypto.
I still had a deep interest, but man, did I have some doubts. Would crypto really be the utopian savior from the world that was? BTC had lost the luster it once had with the general population, ETH was apparently on the path to move to the other most well-known consensus—Proof of Stake—but many didn’t think it would happen for several years, if at all.
I was still following a 2017 ICO-era project, stupidly thinking they would execute on their "roadmap." Part of this was to move to a hybrid consensus with Proof of Stake and Proof of Work. Long story short, and to save the technical details, I thought it would be a good idea to use the last of my capital and run "miners." I did this, absorbing the small cost to run the miners with no reward.
Being a part of this unique aspect of the crypto industry opened a few doors. Not wide open, but ajar enough to slip through the crack. It just so happened that many new projects funded in the post-ICO era were coming to a stage where they could be tested. Many of these projects were using the new PoS consensus. One problem: they needed ~100 validators to provide infrastructure for these protocols and also needed them to be "decentralized."
Many of the types of people/organizations that were capable of this were either very expensive, didn’t fit the decentralization criteria, or outright thought crypto was a scam. To acquire the needed participants, they had to be creative. Cosmos was the first of these, and Zaki Manian famously coined the term "the incentivized testnet" with their Game of Zones program. He has since been on the record stating he regretted creating it due to the mania it created over the coming years.
Here I was, with little but a small amount of experience, able to participate. Not through skill, but because there was no one else. From here, I was able to participate in many of these incentivized testnets and gain equity in some of these blockchains. While they were financially lucrative, the most valuable takeaways I got from this time were being able to access some brilliant people who became mentors and gaining experience in DevOps, business, coding, and getting to know the industry in an intimate way that allowed me to develop a unique perspective.
The moral of this part of the story is that no matter your experience, opportunities exist that even the most professional people don’t understand. In fact, it’s usually the professionals who are too ingrained with old knowledge to see the forest for the trees.
Traits
Often these days, when I find opportunities, they are hard to articulate to people as they are a collection of dissimilar dots that need context that is subjective through experience. I can usually tell almost anyone the opportunity, and they often disregard it for numerous reasons. A small example of this is Quillibrium—a very unique project that I was one of the several bootstrap nodes to start the network in October last year. I had only known about the project because I spent a bunch of time on Farcaster (a very novel decentralized social platform at the time) and knew the founder, Cassie, was one of the most intelligent people I had come across. I let my colleagues and friends know about this opportunity, and only one actually acted upon it. Not insinuating that all or these are profitable or end up anywhere, but if I would have liked one thing back in the early days, it would have been for someone to outline the traits that would make me more lucky. This is a bad way to describe it, but that’s essentially what it is—allowing yourself to have the most opportunities with the largest upside without competition.
While that seems like a falsehood to most people, I would argue there is a framework for setting yourself up for success. In short:
Do what others are not, for whatever reason it may be.
Don’t be afraid to fail. To fail is inherently wrong. It’s a step on a ladder to get to the next rung.
Know that only a small number of wins are achievable. But when you do, it will be from the failings and will have outsized returns, whatever they may be.
Ideally, you set yourself up to think like a venture capitalist about life. Work these days blurs the lines of personal and paid work. Create boundaries but do things you would want to do on a Saturday night (I’m literally writing this on a Saturday night). A great short video on the VC mindset is here, tailor what it suggests to your own life.
Go Get Em
There are many opportunities that exist in the crypto space and life in general right now. While I write this the crypto market is quite bearish, Farcaster has lost its glow for a lot of people and the world seems on the verge of WW3.
Make no mistake, these are the best times to find the opportunities because the lack of competition gives you the edge that doesnt exist otherwise.
And always remember, just because someone is a "professional" doesnt mean they are right.
Regarding crypto work, heres an article I wrote previously about how I view contributing to the space
This article was done in collaboration with the success syndicate(on farcaster) x zoz.eth. You can find me on farcaster here Im happy to Jam or help in any way possible. You can also follow my ramblings on my Paragraph
