Creative Energy Propels Web3 Dominance
The digital transformation altered the course of humanity. A once fragmented world is now hyper-connected—relatives across the globe are only a video call away and the friend you haven’t seen since childhood can catch the highlights of your recent vacation with just a few clicks. When the pandemic hit, we realized we can host a birthday celebration, enjoy a meal from our favorite restaurant, and even work our corporate jobs without ever leaving the couch.
Digital technology helped minimize the impact of the pandemic on our personal lives and our work lives, allowing us to reimagine both. But that reimagination also starkly highlighted the imbalance between the two. Suddenly, we weren’t rushing around to catch flights to meetings that caused us to miss birthdays, baseball games, ballet recitals, bedtime stories, outings with friends, and precious time with ailing loved ones. Instead, we ate dinner every night at home, just steps away from where we’d worked all day, maybe just a room over from where our kids logged in to their virtual classes. While we gave up social outings, travel, and a traditional work environment, we gained time and space for ourselves. Work/life balance was, if only by necessity, rebalanced.
Now, with the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic behind us, many are swept up in what the media has dubbed the new workplace pandemic: a wave of burnout, “quiet quitting” and dissatisfaction. Employees are redrawing boundaries and employers are responding with varying degrees of amenability. Some, like Arianna Huffington and her team at Thrive Global, are putting a focused emphasis on employee mental, emotional, and physical wellbeing, committed to understanding how the growing demands and challenges of the modern workplace affect its constituents. Others are doubling down on the notion that quiet quitting is a betrayal by individual employees, rather than something to be addressed at a foundational level. Others still are offering vague half-solutions that fit neatly in the paradigm of large-scale corporate governance. Google is rolling out a new performance review model that prioritizes employee potential over demonstrated results. But what does that really mean, or look like in practice?
I agree that quiet quitting is a problem, and I value business culture that encourages hard work. But I would argue that we’re going about it all wrong, especially in tech, where employee burnout runs rampant. Even the most enthusiastic employee that shows up each day, engages, and puts forth their best effort to drive the company’s mission, is still only working for just that: the company’s mission. And while the company may reward their hard work with a promotion and an annual raise, or even lucrative options, they’re likely not doing much to foster the employee’s internal motivation, individuality, or creative energy.
Creative energy is an innate human trait that each of us own and develop within ourselves. It belongs to an individual, not to a company, and it’s fed by that individual’s passion, motivation, and belief that there is real, immutable reward in expending it. Every employee has it, and every employee wants to use it, but very few employers encourage it. And when the paychecks are good, we become complacent without exercising it. Many go through a 40-something-year career within the confines of a corporate mission, and never create anything beyond. Why? The risk is too high to extend into efforts that provide immutable incentives for your time, effort, and creative energy.
Web3 is changing that. Web3 is, foundationally, a shift in power from centralized authority to individuals, and the businesses coming out of Web3 are structuring their cultures around this principle. This means incentivizing creative energy, practicing transparency, and celebrating individuality. The best gift an employee can give a company is their creative energy, and the best motivation an employer can give their employees is the support and encouragement of it. And in Web3, each individual has equal opportunity to reap the benefits of their creative energy. Participating in a Web3 project opens you up to a new model—tokenomics that rewards all, not just executive leadership or those granted tightly defined RSUs or options that are anything but immutable.
Tokens can be immutable, secured by private keys, and programmatically structured to eliminate dilution. Tokenomics removes the need to blindly trust large corporate entities and take on immeasurable counterparty risk, instead giving control back to the individual in an equitable, auditable, and mathematically guaranteed way. Tokenization is fueling an entire movement towards community ownership, individual equity, and creative energy as a tool for building sustainable, ownable reward and wealth.
How do we incentivize our employees? How do we build creatively energized teams? Sustainable, ownable reward is a good place to start. Kevin O’Leary, “Mr. Wonderful” himself, tweeted that the smartest, brightest people around the world are dropping everything to work in Web3. And if you walked the halls of Chainlink SmartCon 2022 and witnessed the immense talent and energy radiating from every new Web3 startup, you’d know he was right.
The digital age accelerated and improved the lives of both individuals and employees. The age of Web3 will transcend any distinction between the two, allowing employees to become, once again, primarily individuals—not quiet-quitting, creatively repressed cogs in a corporate machine, but simply, people. When we let people be people, creative energy flows abundantly and innovation shortly follows. That’s what Web3 empowers. If you feel burnt out in a corporate role and you’re looking to re-engage, to ignite your creative energy, and to build something that directly rewards your contribution, we invite you to come explore, learn and join the movement. Web3 is for you. It’s a new economy. It’s immutable. It’s yours and aligned to you, your work, and your interest. Web3 is for everyone.
