Happy New Year! I hope you have had a fulfilling break with family and friends. Like many, I have taken the time to reflect on the year just passed. Back in 2021, I spent my Christmas writing Javascript for the first time in years, opening books (many of which I went on to read), and writing the very first blog post of Empowered Belonging.
Back then I had a different job, a different plan, and different expectations. But I still remember the sense of completeness I felt when the name Empowered Belonging came to me. I felt it encapsulated everything I wanted this blog to be about, exploring how to combine people who felt truly empowered as individuals in a community to which each felt as if they truly belonged. In many respects, ‘empowered belonging’ was a contradiction that I wanted this blog to solve.
Ignorant of how 2022 would unfold, I cheerily began typing away. A series on the lifecycle of ideas followed, from ideation to communication to execution. I strived to marry actionable concision with thoughtful insight, and whilst I would have liked to do more research, I am quite happy with those pieces. I followed it up with a piece on North Stars, whilst interspersing the writing with podcasts I recorded for the New Books Network.
Then I changed my job, moved into web3, and made myself busy.
That shift is clear in so many ways. For one, I stopped podcasting: episodes that had explored capitalism, leadership, and public policy ground to a halt in May before I managed to equalise the ratio of female-to-male interviewees.
But I didn’t stop creating. In my new job, my task is to make Culture3 the authoritative hub for understanding why web3 matters, and my mission is to cut through the disclarity which clouds that sector. That meant more writing, more podcasts, and more publishing. I managed to record with as many women for my Culture3 podcast as I did episodes on the New Books Network all together!
This period also marked a change in focus that had been brewing for some time. In June, I published my favourite piece of 2022, documenting a movement I had long-observed towards niche, dedicated communities, from sweet shops to software. That wasn’t overtly ‘web3’, but the parallels between that and the community focus on the NFT sector cannot be missed.
I never wanted to become a web3 blog, but I synthesised my new knowledge of web3 with trends I saw developing more broadly in order to derive original and important insight. That strategy came to the fore in July’s piece about a (r)evolution in storytelling. It’s better than I remember it being and got me some interesting conversations, the fruits of which I hope to share soon.
I then wrote two pieces that did not mention crypto at all, about the evolution of democracy and different types of leadership. Subscribers, who had become much more web3 on balance by this point, did not click on these articles so much! As compensation, I closed the year with a three-part series on governance in web3. I remember frantically typing away trying to introduce a completely different idea, and realised I had to write 10,000 words on web3 governance first. That turned into three pieces, introducing a spectrum to help us understand web3 governance, exploring one side of it and then the other. These were my most popular pieces of the year.
Looking Back…
Back in December 2021, I told my friend that I wanted to achieve two goals by Christmas 2022. A good idea about what Empowered Belonging means, and a readership to be “weakly impressed by”.
My plan was to write at the intersection of leadership and public policy and create podcasts on the same theme, channeling podcast listeners from the New Books Network’s large base to the blog. That failed for two reasons.
The idea didn’t work.
It turns out that getting people to click a link at the bottom of the podcast shownotes to read a write-up was an unexpectedly tall order.
I stopped doing the idea.
I could have tried harder, sure, but I also stopped making NBN podcasts anyway, and moved into a new niche: web3.
Ultimately, I didn’t spend the year writing about Empowered Belonging like I planned, though I did explore those ideas in greater depth. (In addition, the title remains a useful North Star for what this blog is ultimately about: building better communities.)
I didn’t get the 100 subscribers I hoped for either (I’m on 63), but I did get a handful of paid subscribers, which was delightful. I plan to start reserving some content for paying subscribers this year, as a non-fungible token of gratitude.
..to Look Forward
In 2023, as much as I plan to synthesise web3 with the real world and reflect more on governance and web3, I also want to spend more time thinking about what characterised much of the pre-May era of Empowered Belonging. Simply put, I think these topics of policy, politics, and progress are critically important for moving the world forward.
All in all, in 2023 I am looking forward to writing more about how web3 ties into everything else, how everything else can get better, and how that can help us build better societies.
But I don’t want to spend this month just writing a yearly summary. Instead, I want to use this period to introduce a couple of ideas I’ve been thinking about recently, without going into much depth.
Motivation and the Ambition-Opportunity matrix
I think there is a difference between ambition and opportunity that is scarcely discussed. Perhaps rightly so: I am not claiming that this in the right way to think about anything. I'm just throwing it into the world.
People fall at different points of an opportunity spectrum: some people are more inspired by opportunity than others. On one end, some are inspired by the mere possibility of opportunity. I often see entrepreneurs who set up crazily boring business with huge opportunities and potential. A clear example is Alexandr Wang’s company, Scale AI, which made him billionaire at the age of 25. Huge opportunity, but Scale AI is an incredibly boring company: they produce datasets that companies use to make better artificial intelligence software.
I had another example that was notable enough for me to remember but boring enough for me to not even consider writing down. It was some Twitter thread evangelising the entrepreneurs who build businesses around mom-and-pop stores that still use faxes and things like that, which apparently is a big market. That thread was written for people who care more about the opportunity to build a big business more than what the business is.
On the other end of the spectrum, some ignore very tangible opportunities even if it requires a bit of work. These examples are easier to think of: things like preparing well for a job interview, learning a skill, or revising for an exam. The opportunity from success is right in front of you, all you need to do is to pass that interview, but these very tangible opportunities seem to be less motivating for some people.
All in all, this spectrum refers to how much motivation people gain from opportunity.
Separately, we have an ambition spectrum: some people seem to be much more internally driven than others.
It’s worth noting that we can get confused here. High ambition doesn't necessarily have to be external, ‘building your empire’, and all that. It can also be internal, and we get confused when we forget this. High ambition is easy to identify in someone who wants to build a big organisation or progress far in someone else's, but someone who wants to have a happy family or a happy life is not necessarily less ambitious.
The difference is not in the level of ambition, but in how that ambition is directed. For example, Indians have spent three thousand years thinking about how to find 'the way' in life (mokṣa); Westerners have barely realised that it matters. The core idea is that more ambitious people are more keen to progress their status quo.
By contrast, low ambition is easy to see. Yet we shouldn’t confuse it for low motivation from opportunity. Low opportunity people are not inspired by future opportunities, whereas low ambition people are not inspired by changing their current status quo. Opportunity is motivation via the future. Ambition is motivation via the present.
Why is this useful?
I think these ideas are useful because they help us understand important and impactful characteristics that are difficult to change.
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