Firsthand Account: 6 Months Full Time DAO
My adventure into crypto started with a desire to put funds to work. Idle money is lazy, and it does nothing to help us secure our legacies or futures. I also knew I needed some sort of a hedge against the horrendous lockdown dictations that kept hitting us.
If you asked me at the start of 2021 what I thought my life would look like in 12 months, I never would have guessed this.
I knew coaching is my calling and that spinning up my practice was the only path forward. Business closures, traditional loans being scarce, and a rising health crisis world over.
My adventure into crypto started with a desire to put funds to work. Idle money is lazy, and it does nothing to help us secure our legacies or futures. I also knew I needed some sort of a hedge against the horrendous lockdown dictations that kept hitting us.
That led me down the path of signing up for my first exchange and looking for quality content to learn the lay of the land. A bunch of brave ads later I finally clicked the button to check out what the Bankless HQ promotions were all about.
After all, we work hard for our money, whose to tell us how or where to spend it? Taking full control of my finances sounded pretty damn appealing to me. It's also something I can't ever really see myself giving up control over again.
A couple of weeks after becoming a premium subscriber to the Bankless HQ newsletter the airdrop which started Bankless DAO was upon us. "An airdrop, ownership of this thing called a DAO, what the hell is going on?" I thought to myself as I dove on in.
The rationale was simple: I committed to learning how to be my own bank, it only makes sense that I'd do what I can to surround myself with like-minded folks. If I'm going to learn, I might as well learn from some of the people leading the pack, yeah?
It took 3-5 months for me to realize that I was actually full-time DAO. Between market fluctuations (yeah, how about that....), inconsistent and unreliable comp structures, it wasn't easy to see that I could make it work. Yes, there was and still is, a lot of FUD around making the right choices and being this early in a budding space.
That uncertainty may never go away. It's something we must lean into and learn to embrace.
Coach Viking
Burnout and call fatigue are real, and they are worse than default "work" in some cases. Our definition of work is completely redefined and dropped on its head. There are no clear lines or definitions around a lot. We "see" what needs to be done and just do it.
Accommodating time zones the world over adds to the contention. People are burning the candles at both end to accommodate 24/7 calls in a space that never sleeps (why aren't we creating shifts and teams that specialize in time-zone friendly spaces yet?).
Async working systems still have a long way to go before we can fully move away from a call and task-based work method to friendlier async systems. Shout out to Sobol, Iden3, and other DAO tooling working to simplify work!
Self-administration and boundary setting are of the utmost importance. These are 2 skillsets I've observed that a lot of people trying to penetrate the space and go full-time lack.
Coach Viking
These are skill gaps that could create more work and opportunities for other people with other skillsets to help us usher in the new age of work and lifestyle.
We are still early, this is ground 0. The space is budding, energy is flowing, the buildooors are buidling. Unless we learn to establish our boundaries and distribute workloads to teams more efficiently we will keep facing high turnovers.
It's not for everyone. VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) is a force that is on steroids within DAO's. It's a lot to keep up to, learn and understand.
As individual producers, we must learn to embrace the VUCA and design our own systems so we can personally thrive and swim through the blue oceans we've created for ourselves.
It's high stress, high reward, and a whole lot of fun.
It's not for everyone and it can be extremely mentally and emotionally demanding. Here's to another year.
Bonus reading: building relationships with DAO's:
Coach Viking