I Do Nothing as My Passive Systems Do Everything, and Sometimes I Feel Guilty
What I'm Up To (aligning), What I Reflected On (Passive Systems), and What's Occupying My Mind (Buy Now Pay Later NFTs)- all part of Allen's Friday Flights
Hello Professionally Curious One!
Would you look at that? I published on time!
Happy Cinco De Mayo / Revenge of the Fifth
Cheers!
Me
Past Publications
What I’m Up To
TL;DR: It’s time to rest.
The Things:
I acquired 9 NFTs. I don’t know if I can look in the mirror.
Did you know Unopened Lego Boxes appreciate 11% YoY in the Secondary Market? That is greater growth than gold. Things I tell myself as a result of buying this thing.
Picked up Cult of the Lamb for Steamdeck/PC
Binged Shrinking on Apple TV - For the HIMYM fans, this one is a must. If you want to see what healthy and/or unhealthy coping mechanisms that are clearly articulated is like - well this is it. Here’s their spotify playlist.
Started watching For All Mankind - where have I been?! Episode 1 is slow - Episode 3 sells it.
My High Yield Savings Account paid me $151 last month alone. Sweet.
It takes about 10 days for an international ach/wire to clear in traditional methods. It takes me 1 minute to get crypto to clear internationally. That’s the difference y’all.
Ledger: You can test your recovery key phrase without wiping it. In case anyone couldn’t figure out if their recovery key phrase still worked…
Lifetime Fitness has a killer breakfast sandwich.
What I Reflected On
TL;DR: This week I didn’t have much energy to do things and had a heavy reliance on passive systems to provide value.
I Do Nothing as My Passive Systems Do Everything
I focus on building scalable processes and technologies. I like to be a passive participant in it all; or at the very least, I only need to do one thing every now and then.
That spreadsheet that is terrible, requires a webinar to articulate, and has no rhyme or reason to its construction? It will be conquered and streamlined, assuming the dollar value to me is big enough.
This multi-person problem that for some reason requires manual communication all the time for trivial items? No longer.
At my day job, I have built what is essentially a self-running cob web of systems designed to catch, organize, and respond to all sorts of problems and challenges that previously plagued the organization.
These self-running systems do such a great job accelerating work that things that were error prone, manually intensive, or annoying are no longer an issue. Things such as simple folder organization accelerate work 10x, especially when the requestor is the head of a vertical and they need to look at docs last minute.
As a result of such habits - A lot of my time gets freed up from having to be paying active attention hourly, to only needing to pay attention once a day or less.
My capacity frees up, which is a nice healthy reprieve when I need to tackle multiple issues constantly.
But sometimes there are weeks where there aren’t that many issues for me to solve.
And I start to think two thoughts:
Guilt
I sometimes feel guilty when I am resting or not actively doing anything during the work day, even though my systems are passively “doing the work”.
I’ll periodically monitor my systems to see if they are performing, adjust as necessary, and move on about my day.
It’s odd.
I preach building passive systems, and claiming the rest you deserve. Yet sometimes I still feel guilty not pressing each hour.
I think this time around is I didn’t have the motivation to do anything else (e.g., play video games). To be fair, I may be exhausted as hell as I haven’t had quality sleep this week due to a number of factors including a cat go to urgent care.
I have to remind myself: It takes more energy to build robust, invisible systems and that I need to perceive such wins as greater than active energy management.
Perception
Speaking of perception, it’s important that I note what kind of environments reward passive systems, vs active optics.
I've been in an environment where I had to optically look busy, and coworkers would give snide comments if I was “not doing anything” (not doing busy work) even though I’m able to process problems that took 40 hours in about 20 minutes, routinely. If the knife is dropping (layoffs or reshuffles), everyone is trying to catch it (catch more work) and look busier and busier. Kind of a stupid point because adding more work just means you get paid less.
I’m currently in an environment that benefits greatly from turning major firefights and scrambles into boring Wednesday check-ups. That’s because I story tell how much they don’t need to worry or it’s not a significant risk anymore, and that their bandwidth needs to shift to other matters.
Closing thoughts
It’s incredibly easy to get into a trap where grand gestures and active work somehow provides more value than passive systems.
Such thinking is based on active, billable hours. You know, when you were hourly. But when you are salaried, well - you need to approach your own value measurement differently too.
What’s Occupying My Mind
TL;DR: The arrival of Buy Now Pay Later on NFTs, and Borrowing against them.
You read the right.
You can borrow against NFTs.
You can put NFTs on a payment plan.
Instinctively this is the most degenerate, and stupid idea.
But then I realized - wait a minute, that’s a proof of concept.
The Buy Now / Pay Later and Borrow mechanisms is the first frontier in smart contracts giving solutions to time-based cashflow management.
You see, as advance Crypto touts itself out to be, it’s still a cash-based economy that is based on high one-time transaction costs.
An example: In blockchain, to purchase a house (or other asset), you need to have 100% of the cash balance.
That is capitally prohibitive.
Now, in blockchain, to purchase a house (or other asset), you can do a payment plan where you need to pay a static % every month. Which means you can use the income from staking you expect to receive monthly to also pay the monthly bill.
A Credit Card alternative was essentially created.
Clever.
Anyway now that we have complex mechanics for NFT Pics, I recommend running for the god damn hill.
Bye.