Recovering intellectual tells....well, some

Hi, I’m AlanC

This will be a short story about myself, describing the small part of me that brought me to Steemit, where I hope I can carve out a good place for myself.

I am a child of public servants. My mother was a Music Teacher (retired, her parents were also both teachers) and my father an Environmental Scientist. My parents played a wonderful role in my upbringing, and have given me a deep respect for public servants, and I truly believe that much of society could not function without them. But, there is a perspective and an ethic that comes from being a public servant, from their position with respect to government, the public, and business that differs markedly from most other citizens. A large part of my life has been spent understanding, identifying and questioning this perspective within myself. My only stints in public service were as a 2010 Census taker and a brief internship several years before that. These experiences convinced me that, even though I feel close to it, public service was not for me.

In addition, before graduating college I used to firmly believe that government can solve the world’s problems. Since then, I’ve lost that conviction. Even more, I’m not even sure if it can solve many problems at all (it can create them though!).

Fortunately, I came across the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. This book gave voice to a feeling that I’ve had for long time. Habit 4 is “Think Win-Win.” (It has become trite marketspeak now, but the idea is both compelling and profound.) Focussing on mutually beneficial solutions builds a great foundation. Anytime you can find a win-win solution where one did not exist before, you’ve taken a big step forward. This is what markets bring and why they allow things to flourish. Thinking more broadly, as the information age grows and expands, as more options and choices proliferate throughout our lives, Win-Win, or mutually beneficial solutions, are taking over. These choices are, one by one, crowding out other and older ways of doing business.

This, I believe, is the quiet, nearly imperceptible revolution going on. I think Bitcoin, Steemit and other Crypto are rapidly becoming the central front of this revolution. I think these ideas and experiments are very subversive. I think they have the potential to take down some pretty big walls. And Humanity will thank us for it. I think the powers that be, AKA, “they,” won’t realize the power of decentralization until it’s too late, maybe it already is. And decentralization is just one part of people moving away from the adversarial and domineering methods of ‘moving stuff around’, and towards a voluntary, mutually beneficial, win-win way.

I hope that one day, thousands or millions of decentralized experiments later, governments that have armies and the ability to control people are just distant memories, and the roles that they once played are taken over by opt-in systems that exist without leaders.

Those are my hopes and dreams, right now however, I work as a display tech/ crew lead. I do pretty well at it. I travel a lot. I bang on things with hammers. I make things look pretty for companies you all know and love, and hate. I continually acquire more cool shit (power tools, gear etc.). And there is very little win-win in my industry, my assistants follow what I say or do, and if it’s not followed correctly I make them do it right, or fix it myself, and I follow the instructions given to me by the people in the offices. Mutual respect gained through proven competency guides us, not big ideals.

In my private time I work on older diesel engine trucks (Ford 7.3L), play poker, trade/study/mine crypto, do Crossfit, 3D print with my highly modified printrbot and watch MMA. I have coded and built websites before, but, I find it more fulfilling to use my whole body, physically destroying things, building, rebuilding or fixing things. I’ve got a lot of little things going on in my life, I’m still looking for my one big one. Until then, I am my biggest project, motivated by shameless self-centeredness, self-indulgence, and self-interest. While I look for a larger purpose to which to devote my life, I hold to the notion propagated by airlines and the TSA: “Put on your own oxygen mask before helping those around you.”