2020 started off with the COVID-19 pandemic, and everything changed. What changed most immediately was that everything moved to Zoom. And so I recall, February that year, sitting in on a zoom call for entrepreneurs and deal makers, introducing the concept of Shoptype.
It’s a “network of networks!”, I said, to mostly polite nods. Needed to work on my marketing, I realized. But even when someone understood what I was saying, there were usually one of two reactions, mostly this one: “You’re going to what now? And what, Amazon and Facebook and Google and everyone else will just sit around and do nothing? You’re going to take them all on?”
And the answer was yes and no; we would take them on by not taking them on. But that was difficult to express back then because the software wasn’t built and no one could see it clearly.
I didn’t talk too much about the real goal, that we could do more than just fix commerce, that Shoptype was just one side effect of healing the Internet. Instead, I focused on talking about the incremental profits generated for everyone who connected to the network. Not a lot of people argued with that, they figured it might just work, and there was no downside.
How to Stay Calm in the Eye of the Storm
“He who is quick-tempered can be insulted”, Sun Tzu explained in the Art of War.
“He who sees what is not there, and ignores what is, is the greatest fool”, says me.
And in order to get to the level of clarity one needs to operate in this so-called world, one needs to stay not just stay calm, but remain aware of everything and react to nothing. One needs to be able to see one’s own reactions before they occur, so one never loses oneself, at any moment.
Indeed, one witnesses the functioning of pure intelligence when the mind is not in the way. And if there was only one word of advice I could give you, it would be this: meditate.
PS - Read the whole book at Beyond All Clouds.
