This is the Monday Medley, a newsletter that goes out, you guessed it, every Monday. I republish it here for sharing and referencing, but if you'd like to sign up you can do so right here:
The Internet and computers have given each of us the potential for incredible personal leverage.
Pull the right levers, and you can 10-100x your earning potential by learning how to produce the work of many people. Or, by learning how to reach many more people with your work.
These two gifts of technology: greater output and greater reach, have dramatically increased the opportunities for individual wealth generation. Our grandparents barely had a shot at generational wealth. Our parents may have if they were in the right place for the Computer and Internet booms, but even those were fairly closed off to most people.
If you're reading this though, those old barriers aren't standing in-between you and generational wealth. You don't need to be in a certain location. You don't need money. You don't need a degree. You don't even need a job. You just need to build. For these next few years, perhaps the next decade, those generational wealth opportunities are going to be in Web3 (crypto, blockchain, whatever you want to call it). Something will come after it, perhaps VR or Space, but for now, that's where the next area of growth is.
So how do you get in on it? Buying and holding Ethereum isn't a bad place to start, nor is getting up to speed on DeFi, but you really want to be working in the space.
Learning Solidity is the highest leverage thing you can learn, but most people don't enjoy programming and shouldn't force themselves to do it. Thankfully, there are actually a lot of other skills that these companies need. Community Management and Meme-ing is an incredibly valuable skill, almost on par with programming. Marketing, design, content creation, all really useful. So long as you actually know how to do them very well on your own without any kind of manager or guidance.
What's really different is how you find the work. Start exploring various crypto companies and join their public Discords. Become active in the community, interact with the people on the team, try to be helpful. Then watch for opportunities. This is a radically different world than the Headshots, LinkedIn, and Resume world of Web2. If you're not comfortable being interviewed by someone presenting as an Anime character and never having a voice call, you might be a little uncomfortable.
Beyond joining a Web3 company though, the real opportunities are in building. There is an iPhone-level world of opportunity to build new things on this technology. And there are a few guiding questions for Web3 that I think help a lot:
What do the unbanked need? We'll have 3-4b people coming online for the first time in the next decade, most of them on cell phones, and many of them in countries with unreliable currencies. What kind of financial infrastructure do they need to have access to the same financial opportunities as people in countries like the US?
Where can you unlock the value of work? Crypto video games like Axie Infinity and Crypto Raiders are gaining popularity because they allow players to reclaim some of the value of their work. When you play hours of Fortnite and earn rare skins, there's no way to cash out that work into dollars. But in Axie, there is. Beyond games, where else is all the upside being locked up by companies and not redistributed back to the customers? Education comes to mind, as does insurance, curation, social media, Wikipedia, etc. OnlyFans takes 20% of their creators' revenue. Surely you can build something fairer than that.
How can you remove barriers between creators and consumers? Most of our consumption is filtered and taxed through different intermediaries like YouTube, Spotify, Netflix, etc. We don't need these intermediaries for distribution of most Art anymore. So what might the new financial and distribution arrangements look like?
Could you build a music streaming protocol running autonomously and serving MP3s from IPFS that charges people purely based on their usage, and pays not only artists but also playlist curators, lyric annotators, etc? How much more could you pay artists in a protocol like this where you may only need 1/100 of the employees?
The opportunities are quite literally endless, and you only spot more of them as you dive in deeper. This is a once-in-a-decade (perhaps less often) opportunity to build the future. And jumping into the new "technology of the future" has never been easier.
If you're not sure how to start, I also wrote last week about "high speed career sampling." It might spark some ideas. This trend is just getting started, and for almost any kind of technology you're interested in or use today, there's going to be a Web3 version of it built in the next decade.
Why not be part of it?