Forever ago, while after a couple years working in the hotel industry after getting my undergrad degree in the same, I told my now wife that I wanted to work as an IT Consultant and she laughed. At that point, I had taken an undergrad class in Excel, a stats class and really nothing else that approached the technology landscape. Now, that’s where I am, and when I look at myself today, the same desires that I saw as a really good fit for being an IT Consultant drive what I’m focused on today.
What I had learned in the couple of years that I was working after undergrad was that if I was doing the same thing day after day, I got bored, and what I got hooked on was trying to figure out how to use excel to do things better. I built a crude yield management system for the bed and breakfast that I was managing, looking at booking trends over the course of a couple of years to decide on when we should raise or lower our room rates. I wrote some VBA to automate some tasks for financial reporting that I had to do. I learned how to use Microsoft Access to calculate my golf handicap. Each time I learned something new, there was more that I could do, and yet, once I had mastered it, if what I was doing with it wasn’t interesting, then just using the technology became boring too.
Looking at my current role, I feel lucky in that I get to work on a series of projects, each of which brings a new challenge, and the ability to learn something new, and each time a start a new one, I’m fully engaged with figuring everything out and the challenge of applying the right solution to the situations and requirements that are being faced. Over time within a project though, as I’m sure many others encounter, the newness wears off over time, and the shiny new things in the news, in articles online, and in discussions with my peers grab me and try to pull me away.
In the last month or, I’ve had an epiphany when it comes to this though. I found myself reading yet another article about blockchain. It’s one of those things that I feel like I should be interested in, but over the past couple years as I read various articles and watched a TED talk or two, the subject just never really grabbed me. I never really understood how what I saw as a somewhat narrowly focused crypto and nft technology tool was going to really change things. Then I read this article, and it talked about blockchain in the context of enabling data ownership, and web3 technology. That story resonates really well with a quote that I keep on coming back to:
If something is free, you’re the product
Richard Serra, 1973
I don’t want to be a product. If you’ve watched The Social Dilemma on Netflix, it’s a little terrifying. If there’s a way to enable data ownership, THAT has my attention, and suddenly, I’m all in on blockchain, web3, dapps, and that whole world. And that experience of a sudden deep interest lead to my epiphany. I’m not actually addicted to new technology in and of itself. I’m addicted to solving problems. My talents happen to be on the technology side, so that’s my hammer of choice, but it’s the problem solving that grabs me by the ears and gets me engaged.
*For my Centric colleagues….if I do renege on the promise to myself to not do a CampIO presentation this year, this is where my head is currently at. If anyone wants to join forces, I’d love collaborate.
Finding Order in the Chaos 