Dictated By The Hype 🐏
And following the herd, year after year with Creator Economy, Web3, AI, and so on…
Hey friends 👋
I have been following the startup ecosystem for about 3 years now. When I started out, everyone seemed super excited about the creator economy. TikTok was on the rise & YouTube was huge. Everyone thought creators were the next generation entrepreneurs who are going to change how businesses are operated. Still, most of it stands true. But back then, every other person who was on tech Twitter seemed to believe that the creator economy was the next big thing and everything else seemed unimpressive to work on.
Fast forward a year, and then came the NFT & web3 boom. I don’t even need to describe the excitement (hype) around this space. Just the terms - GM, WAGMI & LFG seem enough to convey the level of excitement people on Twitter had around the space. This was the next wave of the internet. Something that is profoundly innovative. Something that will change how we interacted with the internet. Every other person on Twitter was so bullish about web3 and wanted to work on this space.
But that’s not it. Fast forward another year, and we have AI. Yet another technology that is life-changing.
All these new technologies are super exciting. Obviously, all of them have the potential in creating tons of value for the consumer. But here’s my problem. No one could create true value by jumping from one wave to another, year after year, thinking this new shiny technology will help them change the world for the better.
I know a person, who was super excited a few years back about the creator economy. He started an Instagram page, gained a bunch of followers and was doing good. When the web3 wave came about, he pivoted to building stuff for web3. And guess what? now the same person is working on building tools for AI.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against this person or the way they approach doing this. In fact, they made much more money than other friends in my circle. But I have a few thoughts about why one should choose the other way around this and not follow the hype herd. So let’s go.
Short-term & long-term people
Like any other person, I started my journey on Twitter by being a devoted follower (simp) of Naval. Naval has this great tweet on working and career:
This is obvious in the case of a person who works super hard being a delivery agent compared to a software engineer. But the intensity starts to reduce when the space becomes similar. What you work on is really important, but building anything valuable, in any space, takes time. In fact, a lot of time. What you work on and who you work with on a long-term basis is far more important than jumping on to something new that seems like the best thing to work on, every single year.
Naval also has another tweet where he mentions working with long-term people:
I think it’s fair enough to assume that people who are driven by hype are usually the short-term people, whom you don’t want to work with if your vision is to create value in that space. These are 2 different paths. Both can lead to financial success, but it’s important to consciously choose the path you wish to take.
Don't just ride the wave, create them!
Creator economy, Blockchain, NFTs, Web3, Blockchain, and Generative AI, all these technologies did not emerge from anywhere. They were being built by people years before they had any traction. The hype did not drive these people to work on these technologies, it’s the true belief and the vision they had that made the difference.
An interesting thing about generative AI is that the model that powered ChatGPT existed months before ChatGPT was launched. It was freely available to everyone to use but it was not intuitive enough. It’s when ChatGPT came out, the whole world started seeing the potential of the tech underneath and started building on top of them. So for a company like OpenAI, this was unexpected. The hype was not engineered by them, it just happened.
No matter if they had this traction or not, they would have still continued to build the company. If not now, they would have gotten the traction sometime in the future because they have created something of true value. And I think that’s what matters more in the long run.
Working on things that you really care about and things that you truly believe in is essential to making a huge impact. And identifying what you really care about is hard. As someone who is new to this industry, I don’t have a clear conviction in the areas I want to work in. This brings me to this question:
How do you know what you should be working on?
Building principles and systems
I ask this question to myself very often. I haven’t found a clear answer but I have a few thoughts about this. I had conversations with people who I consider smarter and wiser than me and one common answer that everyone gave was - having principles.
Coming up with a set of principles with your experiences and building a system to make these irreversible decisions can make a huge difference. Building these requires a lot of reflections from the past and self-questioning yourself about things you care about. This helps you build a frame of reference around which you can take in the new information to make decisions. When there is no frame of reference, everything might seem exciting and everything might seem like The One. Which might not be true.
It's hard to really be independent and make decisions that aren't influenced by the rest of the world. Every decision is in fact influenced in some way or other. But I believe having your own principles and systems definitely helps in making a balanced choice when you are presented with one.
I also think it’s 100% okay to be excited about these new technologies. One does not have to be dictated only by their old principles and systems either. The right balance is what matters. Here’s a good writing by Dan Shipper where he shares his perspective on why he gave himself permission to be excited about AI.
This essay is more of a self-reflection and a reminder to myself. And I would like to end it with a quote by Tim Ferriss which I think is relevant and powerful:
“What you don’t do determines what you can do.”
💫 This week in Read Write Run
📝 Best articles I’ve read:
🎙 Best podcast I’ve listened to:
📹 Best videos I’ve watched:
The most beautiful shots in film history - I’ve watched it so many times and it still remains the best!
🏃 Follow my running journey
I ran for 4 days this week and 5 km per run. Pretty good week, feeling good. You can follow me on Strava.