10 WAYS TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE EMERGENT ERA THAT Beth Comstock SO ELOQUENTLY DESCRIBES
My life was going down the tubes until i came up with one simple concept that saved everything. Saved my life.
I had lost my job. I had no money. I had lost my business. I had lost my family. I felt like I had no options.
Once I realized that I had to change in order to keep up with this Emergent Era, things started to change. Beth is dead on about what is happening, but everyone has to find their way to react to it.
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The “social economy” has turned into the “access economy” has turned into the Emergent Economy.
Instead of just people reaching out and communicating with each other, we now are communicating with each other by offering access.
Here’s how it works:
There are three parts to every Emergent business:
A) People who have an excess of “something” (rooms, cars, services, knowledge).
B) People want to pay for that excess (someone who is vacationing and wants to stay in a home instead of a hotel for instance.)
C) BUSINESS: the platform in the middle that enables discovery, connection, payment, messaging, and mediation. Airbnb, Uber, etc.
The world is going to keep changing. The access economy and the mobile economy are just the latest. Next is the virtual reality economy. After that…who knows? The gene printing economy? Again…who knows.
Every day, people have two choices: worry about the old way. Or plan for the new way.
The old way is the world carved up by borders with corporations, governments, Presidents, Brevets, regulations, rules, middlemen.
This world is very real. But it’s dissolving. The need for borders will begin to disappear with 2 billion people already on Facebook and talking to each other.
The need to fill empty cubicles at massive bureaucratic corporations is going away when, as Kevin Kelly puts it, “productivity is for robots”.
So how can we best take advantage of this Emergent Economy.
When I was at my lowest, so low I considered the worst, when nobody would return calls, when I had no money but a family to raise, here is what I started doing. Here is what I still do:
10 WAYS TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE EMERGENT ECONOMY:
A) The Daily Practice.
I’ve written about this before. But when I looked at all my failures and successes. The successes had one thing in common: A daily routine of health:
i. Physical: eat, move, sleep
ii. Emotional: be around people I love and who love and inspire me.
iii. Creative: be creative every day to exercise that muscle.
iv. Grateful: Anger and Fear can’t exist in the same brain that is focused on Gratitude.
B) The 1% Rule
Even though it is hard to quantify: every day try to improve a tiny tiny bit on all four areas mentioned in “The Daily Practice”.
Compounding is amazing. 1% a day is 3800% a year. You can turn into a machine that way.
C) The Idea Muscle
Every day write down 10 ideas a day. Write down 10 bad ideas. In one year you will have 3,650 ideas.
One or two of them might be good but it doesn’t matter.
Within six months you will be an IDEA MACHINE. I have seen it happen for me. And for many others.
D) Happiness = Reality / Expectations
In the old economy, I think I outsourced my self-esteem to “what school did I go to”, “what career do I have”, or to my boss, or my significant other, or to some metric like weight or books written, or people who like me.
Reality is hard to change. If I am 500 lbs today, the best I can hope for is I’m 499 lbs in a week. And bit by bit (the 1% rule) I can change reality.
But expectations can change in a second. We choose those. “I don’t need to depend on a promotion this year to be happy”.
Before we can take advantage of all the amazing changes in the Emergent Economy, we have to focus on the changes in our expectations, increase our happiness, and then we can focus on how to take advantage of our reality.
E) Platform > Profit
Every business in this economy starts off with a platform well before the profits come in. Facebook probably had 100 million users before they excepted advertising revenues.
If you have a passion you love, here are some of the things you can do now to build a community (a platform) around it.
- instagram with photos and short stories about your passion.
- medium, write essays about every topic under the sun related to your passion
- youtube
- snapchat
- podcast (interview all of your heroes in your passion).
Always an authentic and sincere voice will rise above the noise.
F) Passion > Platform.
if one person is passionate about building an “uber for maids” and another person isn’t, the person with passion will win.
How do you find your passion?
Idea sex: Keep making your list of ten ideas. But start combining ideas. This is the genesis of almost every great invention and business in history.
Take air travel as an example. The government was spending millions on how to build a plane.
They were failing.
Two guys with a bike shop said, “Wait a second, a bike works because it is allowed to wobble”.
A year later, The Wright Brothers built and flew the first plane.
The frontier of the Emergent Economy are the fragments and puzzlle pieces of the last economy, pasted together in creative ways.
And the way to execute on that is to turn yourself into an idea machine by exercising the idea muscle by writing ten ideas a day down every day.
G) THINK SIDEWAYS
A big trend in the Emergent Economy is the rise of self-publishing.
In order to publish a book, you used to need the following people to read and like your book:
agent, editorial assistant, editor, marketer, publisher, bookstore purchaser.
Now…you just upload your book to Amazon.
But not everyone wants to write a book.
The good thing about the Emergent Economy, where borders disappear and the traditional middleman are gone, is that ancillary businesses will rise from the ashes of the old ways.
Businesses that help people write books. Design books. Edit books. Market books. Podcasts about books.
Or…not everyone is going to make a business with the latest virtual reality technology.
Some people, though will build huge businesses making every real estate listing a VR walk through. Or live events streamed on VR. And on and on.
Look for the sideways businesses that the Emergent Economy are creating by accident.
H) IDEAS ARE THE CURRENCY OF THE EMERGENT ECONOMY
Earlier I mentioned the basic ideas of a platform in this economy:
- excess
- people who need excess
- platform to mediate
Perhaps the greatest abundance, though, can be found not with people who have an extra room or an extra car seat — but people with the most knowledge and ideas.
Example: If you have access to the latest scientific research all over the world on cancer cures, then this is excess knowledge.
Many people would pay for access to that excess knowledge.
A newsletter, a course, a book, a webinar, a podcast, or many of the way to build a platform that connect the two.
So the key is to develop knowledge in the areas that interest you. Focus heavily on those areas in ways that you wish someone would have done for you.
Areas might be finance/stocks, nutrition, weight loss, health, deals, business opportunities, etc.
I) SKILLS > EDUCATION
An “education” usually refers to what place did I spend $100–200,000 to get a piece of paper.
Skills are: “Yes, I know how to create a virtual reality”. Or “Yes, I know a lot about fantasy sports”. Or, “Yes, I know how to manage 100 different apartments with 80 different owners that are Airbnb-ing their apartments”.
How do you get a skill?
PLUS: Find real and virtual mentors to teach you.
EQUAL: Find people to challenge you and that you challenge.
MINUS: Find people to teach.
This is education in the modern world.
Use every day to acquire skills. This is the real education in the Emergent Economy.
J) EXPERIENCES > OWNERSHIP
About seven months ago I threw out everything I own. I live only in Airbnbs. I own one bag of clothes (three outfits) and one bag with my computer and phone. That’s it.
And I am able to work from everywhere, travel around and see how many different types of people live, and live as cheaply or expensively as I want.
I have children. So when they visit me I just make sure I Airbnb near them and get a place big enough for their needs.
In the emergent economy there are no time sheets. There are only ideas and experiences and how you use those to connect with a community of people who need your ideas.
I am a citizen of the Emergent World. My “taxes” in this world is the effort I put in to developing experiences and new skills, as well as the work I put in to staying healthy and becoming an idea machine.
I have failed and succeeded and failed and succeeded many times. Through trial and error all of the above is what I’ve realized.
The key above all is that we live in the most amazing time ever. Don’t get bogged down in the everyday worries of the media. Headlines today are forgotten tomorrow.
Ideas today are inventions tomorrow are million or billion dollar business the next day.
I’m grateful you read this.
