~~ Written April 2023, posted as is to see changes over time. Plan 2023 >> ~~
Figuring out what makes you tick is a long journey. What your motivations are, why you do the things you do, and what the best ways you can contribute meaningfully are. When I was finishing high school, I thought there were 3 big questions that needed answering for me to have direction in life
"Who am I?" ... "What do I want to do?" ... "Who do I want to do it with?"
I wanted answers to these questions so that I could choose what to do for post secondary, to set myself up on the right path for my life. I'll explain my path through school to work, then some of the inner work I've done, and conclude with where I'm headed now and what I want to do next.
My first thought was that I wanted to do engineering. I spent grade 11 and 12 preparing to do Robotic Engineering at SFU. I did all the math, science, and physics courses required to get in, as well as metal shop as many times as I could since I loved building things. Once I graduated, I started by doing some courses at Douglas to transfer to SFU. After 2 semesters, I went on a trip to Europe for a month with 2 of my friends, and started to do some thinking on life. This was my first pivot, I turned away from engineering because I wanted to do something more hands on. I was also starting to learn more about entrepreneurship, and liked the idea of starting something new. My idea was to create a shared workshop that people could do projects in. I loved being able to use the metal shop in high school to bring my ideas to life, but once I graduated there was nowhere to go. When I got back from Europe and was preparing for the fall 2011 semester, I switched schools to BCIT. I was looking at the Tech Ed Teacher program, I thought that it would give me a good base to work with, and I would be able to learn all the different disciplines, as well as have a shop to work in before I built my own. I had missed the deadline for that year, so I did the Machinist Foundations program. I always liked metal shop and wanted to expand on that. If I wanted to run a shop one day I needed to learn what working inside one was like.
After finishing the 6 month machining foundations course and having a job in a shop, I realized it wasn't for me. I enjoyed building things, but I wanted to create and design my own things, not just follow someone else's blueprints. I was ready to go for the Tech Ed teacher program, and that summer I went to an information night at BCIT to prepare for the upcoming fall semester. However, I was distracted by the Robotics program at BCIT. It looked more fun than the original SFU course that I was looking at, because it was more hands on. I was originally turned off of the SFU course since it seemed too academic, I wanted to get my hands dirty. I joined the BCIT robotics program, and had a good time there. At the end of second semester (April 2013), Bitcoin was brought to my attention by a classmate. I was hooked, I spent the summer researching all about mining and the protocol. When the fall came, I went back to school, but also branched out to meet the Bitcoin community in Vancouver. I started to get some business, make some connections, and eventually it became too much. In January, I dropped most of my classes so that I could focus on Bitcoin projects. I went back to school a year later, and graduated from BCIT Robotics in 2015. I was 23 at this point, and started to get some engineering/robotics jobs, as well as keeping my Bitcoin projects on the side as the market fluctuated.
After graduating high school, I began to dive inside myself with some serious meditation and introspection to figure out who I am and what I can do. It took a long time, it was a wild ride, but now I am very confident with the map I have emerged with. I've written about my experiences here if you want more details. The problem was, there was no clear path or outcome that I could see. All I knew was that I needed the strong base of knowing who I was before I could make other meaningful decisions about my life. I didn't know there was going to be a map, where the map would lead to, or what the map could do. My motivation and drive was based on curiosity, not results. It took till near the end of the journey for some big insights to appear. Even after the big insights, it took a long time to figure out what to do with the insights. It takes a long time to develop super powers, once they appear it takes a long time to train them, and once you've trained them it takes a long time to figure out how to best apply them. None of these steps are visible (or even comprehensible) from the beginning of the journey, the journey has to be taken on faith.
Part of these journeys made me adjust my schooling course as I explored what I liked best. It took until my mid 20's to start to feel like I had a solid idea of things, and then in my late 20's was refining what had been found. When I was busy with school and work, it was harder to focus on myself, but after I graduated I had more time to focus. I was in my mid 20's, I had some good jobs, and I was happy bouncing between different projects as a freelancer/contractor. I always had projects with different companies, and those helped guide me to find what I really enjoy doing. Problem solving is my favourite, I enjoy seeing things move through from idea -> design -> reality, I've always liked looking at systems from all different layers. I enjoy optimizing, finding better, more efficient ways or automating things. One of my most fulfilling things to do at work was being able to run my own job. I would try to make processes, make it more efficient, make myself have less and less work to do, until eventually I optimized myself out of the system. For example I was hired at one job to help customers make custom electronics projects with the products we sold. I started to notice that these custom projects had a lot of overlap, so I started to write up instruction guides and product manuals for all of our products. Eventually we were able to point the customer in the right direction of how to make whatever project they wanted. The company wasn't making big money selling our engineering time, it was all in the sales, so shrinking our work load allowed us to help more customers with questions on their projects, instead of building it for them, and we sold way more products. The instruction guides were placed on different websites beyond our own, which spread the net of our reach, acted as marketing, and drove more customers to our site for more sales.
I used to think of my favourite job as being a scout. The company was a big army travelling across the land, the king (CEO) guiding them. Layer upon layer of logistics, different departments handling food, the animals, the soldiers, everything needed to keep the army moving smoothly in the right direction. I never cared to be part of the army and climb the ranks, to be the best soldier, the best chef, the best driver. I wanted to be my own small unit, operate outside (but adjacent) to the army, exploring new things. It's valuable for the King to check out different routes without committing the entire army in a direction. Having a small scouting unit that can go and check all the little paths to see if they're success or failures before letting the king know if they need to redirect. I liked working in prototyping and R&D labs, testing new ways of doing things or automating things to make processes smoother.
Very early on, in my mid-late 20's, I felt like I had "made it". I had my dream job, my ideal life. I could never imagine one job that I wanted to do, my favourite was bouncing between different projects, trying new things, exploring new industries. Even though it was "ideal", I started to long for something bigger. I felt like I was filling a toolbox. All these new jobs, new experiences, new projects, they were tools to be used, they all built on each other allowing greater things to be done. For a while, I was happy with that. I liked getting new tools and expanding my capabilities. But I wanted more. I didn't want to grow my toolbox for the sake of growing my toolbox, I wanted to find a big project that let me apply my whole toolbox, where I could really push myself to grow and contribute. I felt lost in searching for a project worth dedicating myself to.
I tried all the classic methods of "find your purpose, find your why, find what you love doing" but nothing was specific enough. I love solving problems, but that's applicable in a million situations. I liked helping people, I liked teaching/seeing people learn and grow. I'm more introverted so I didn't want to lean too hard into teaching or working with others. I liked the engineering and systems based side of things more. All I knew is I wanted to solve a big problem that helped the world, and that it was a problem that fully used my unique skill sets. I was proud of my engineering technical skills, but I knew that my systems based thinking and meditations could lead me to something more.
The engineering was a physical manifestation of those systems, but there were other places the systematic processes could be applied. I was spending time thinking of my Why. I liked "freedom and exploration", that was something I wanted for the people of the world. People should be free to live the lives they want, and not be held back by poverty or lack of opportunity. I also liked "optimizing and improving efficiencies" of everything, that was something that could apply to everything. I had put years into optimizing my own mental space, I was able to expand that into helping my friends with decisions in their lives. They would come to me to help them sort through their decision making processes. I saw some opportunities there, but I wasn't interested in going down the "therapist" path of helping others, I preferred the more technical side.
As COVID hit, a bunch of the companies I was working with pulled back their research operations, so I went back to crypto and worked on my own projects. I'd been in the crypto space for years, it was time to expand my horizons beyond Bitcoin into Ethereum and DeFi. I wanted to find a way to make ROIs, as well as protect against the wild market swings. I started working with risk analysis, doing some financial market research and experiments in the DeFi space, and I realized that's something I really liked doing. "Risk management" was the wrong word, because it implied taking smaller/less risks. I didn't want to manage risks so that they were smaller risks, I wanted to manage potential damage or sources of failure so you could be free to take bigger risks with less potential fallout and danger. The breakthrough was the label of "fear reduction". I want people to be less afraid, so that they can be more free, grow as a person, and explore new things. This fit with the engineering R&D work I did as well, I helped the companies explore new options with a low risk investment. Instead of dedicating big departments to a new process, they could use me to do small experiments to test out new things before making a bigger commitment.
"Fear reduction" is a good label, but it evolved into "overhead reduction". When an entity has less overhead, it has less to lose. There's less to protect, less to fear. Being small and nimble allows you to do more things and explore more options. This concept fit with the meditations and introspection that I did. I've explained myself as a "marshmallow surrounding a rock". There is a dense unchanging core in me, I know what I'm about and the values I protect. But all around that is the big bits that I'm flexible on, that I'm not attached to, that I can add and remove as needed. Most entities (people or companies) fear to protect the entire marshmallow, which makes them stuck. Fear reduction allows them to see that there are ways of acting while protecting themselves. Overhead reduction helps reveal the essence of who you are. Knowing your essence shows you what really needs protection, and what can be experimented on to grow.
As of now, that's my favourite "Why", my favourite MTP. Overhead reduction, leads to fear reduction, leads to optimization, leads to more freedom and a better world. My path has been meandering, but I've been meandering in the correct direction, narrowing in on what's most important, while expanding on my capabilities and doing the best I can. For now, everything has coalesced into My Plan 2023 , where you can read more of what I'm working on these days and what I hope to accomplish next!