Just about 10 years ago, I had a migraine that lasted two weeks. I have never been in such pain; even an ER visit and a morphine drip didn’t touch it. Then, 6 months later, I had a stomach pain that just wouldn’t go away. Finally I went to the hospital, and it turned out that the stomach pain wasn’t indigestion, and the migraine wasn’t a migraine; both were actually blood clots.

And so I embarked on a multi-year journey to try and figure out why the clots were forming. In the end, after dozens and dozens of tests and weeks in various hospitals, we came up empty — and as a result, I have been on blood thinners as a precautionary measure ever since.

For me, it was the first time I ever dealt with a chronic condition. I had had plenty of injuries before — mostly broken bones and other sports-related injuries — but I’d never dealt with anything internal, and never anything… permanent. Not a welcome feeling.

I would say it has taken me close to 10 years to really internalize this. I have resisted it. Not only is the blood clotting a problem in itself, but the medicine causes its own problems — specifically, constant risk of over-bleeding. In other words: if I don’t take my medicine, I’m at risk of clotting up, and if I do take my medicine, and something happens (like a car crash or bike accident) I’m at risk of bleeding out. My wife put it pretty succinctly the other day when she said: “Anyone could fall down the steps, hit their head and die. That means you need to be more careful than everyone.” Ugh.

Being more careful than everyone has never been my strong suit, and really just isn’t in my nature. But truth is, that’s how it has to be, and I need to deal with it.

Here is the funny thing about making life-changing… changes. On the one hand, it feels lousy, unfair, and like missing out. On the other hand, when I think about the people I know who have done it, I am the most proud of them.

I remember when my uncle, who passed away a few years ago, had a health scare and abruptly quit drinking and smoking (after many years of doing both pretty seriously). I was maybe 14 at the time, but I remember being so impressed by the way he took the reigns and just did it. He knew he needed to, and was almost gleeful and proud about taking a hard right turn towards his health (and for his family).

An entrepreneur I know recently made a huge concerted effort to exercise, lose weight, quit drinking, and doubled down his focus both on his personal relationships and his company. He is thriving, big time. I see an effort like that and I am like, damn, that’s awesome. It takes courage and dedication to make changes like that. But it is so beautiful.

Another friend was in a bad place with his marriage. After close to 10 years and three kids, he and his wife finally divorced. After some time, they are both better off and have things going in a new way, on a more solid foundation. He, in particular, seems so renewed and rejuvenated. Almost like being healed from a sickness.

It feels like it often takes a big shock, of some kind, to make these kinds of changes. I will never forget another time, back in 2008 — I was dealing with a challenging situation at work, and wasn’t dealing with it well — ruminating, avoiding. I remember sitting in the doctor’s office, watching my son’s ultrasound, and seeing and hearing his heartbeat for the first time. Right at that moment I resolved to deal with the situation head on because, shit, I was undoubtedly responsible for important things and didn’t have time to fuck around.

There is something about that feeling of being forced to make a big change that ultimately does it. Without that, it is often just too easy to let things be as they are, and to continue sliding through.

So, to everyone out there who is mulling a major change that has the potential to fix something important in your life; I hope to give you just the smallest bit of extra strength as you consider it.

Last night I went to see RAIN, a Beatles tribute band, with my friend and neighbor Jeff. If you haven’t been to one, tribute bands/shows are kind of odd: on the one hand, typically technically/musically perfect (the tribute band can play the entire catalog of the original band flawlessly); and on the other hand, the vibe is strange: it’s a band pretending to be a band, so it doesn’t have any original energy or punch.

As I was watching the show I kept thinking about this. What is the difference between being a Beatle and being a musician that can play the Beatles catalog perfectly, in character?

Perhaps the answer is obvious, but it still got me thinking. I believe the answer is part creativity and part risk. Creativity because, of course, half of being the Beatles is actually inventing the music, not just playing it. Probably more than half the challenge.

And on risk: playing new music, music that has not been played before, or “digested” and understood by the general public, is hugely risky. People won’t “get it” right away, or worse may simply hate it (whether on the merits or just for being new and different).

On a broader level, it got me thinking about the difference between being a leader and a follower. Once the creative work is done, and the opportunity is de-risked, it is relatively easy to look at something and copy the execution. But it takes creativity and balls to do it on your own the first time.

This applies to all things — music, art, writing, a startup, investing, restaurants, etc. I have seen it particularly first hand in the startup and investing world, where a “lead” investor not only has the foresight and conviction to back an early team, but they have the leadership to bring other investors along.

Courage and conviction are contagious.

Continuing on the theme of what decentralization is good for, this week I would like to focus on one of the most powerful drivers in the near-term: Platform Risk.

Platform Risk is is the risk that the tech platform that you build your product/app/business/life on will become a critical dependency, will become unreliable, and/or worse, will screw you in the end.

Here is a post from a few years back that details many different flavors of platform risk, many of which are benign, and some of which are malicious. And here are some examples, to make it more concrete:

• Microsoft Windows: withholding APIs & documentation from competitors, and blocking distribution
• ISPs / Telcos: blocking / throttling certain kinds of traffic (especially video & VoIP)
  
• Google: determining the fate of sites reliant on search traffic and therefore at the whim of the algorithm
• Apple / iOS: blocking competitive apps, withholding APIs, taking a 30% cut, to the point that app developers have formed a union
  
• Amazon: competing with third-party sellers and manipulating search results
  

This is not to say that any of these acts are necessarily illegal, or even immoral. But if you are investing serious time and money — especially dropping everything to build a business on a platform — these kinds of risks are of grave concern.

So, what does decentralization have to do with platform risk? When the platform is a protocol (i.e, decentralized) rather than a company (i.e., centralized), the rules of engagement are known up front and can’t change on a whim or because of a business decision.

If we think about the original internet protocols (TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP, FTP, SSL, etc), they are a set of networking, communications and data exchange protocols that ultimate form the platform we know of as the web. While there are certain forms of platform risk on the web (e.g., stability, speed, security), the web on the whole has become a very stable and reliable platform, generally absent of the flavors of risks detailed above.

Cryptonetworks (i.e., public blockchains and cryptocurrencies) combine the architecture of the original internet protocols with the functionality of today’s corporate applications platforms (data management & transactions). While there are still major issues to solve before these systems collectively become a mainstream platform, they are gaining major adoption from developers in large part because developers are so keenly aware of platform risk, and see cryptonetworks as a type of platform they can trust.

As an illustrative example, let’s compare downloads of the Truffle framework (a popular dev tool for Ethereum):

source: Truffle Dashboard

… with the price of ETH over the same time period:

source: Messari

Developers are the canary in the coal mine when it comes to platforms. And at the moment, they are pointing to the desire for platforms with less inherent risk, more reliability and more trust.

Over the long weekend, I spent a bunch of time with my kids doing outdoor cold weather activities. I love the winter, and I love winter sports — there is something about being outside on a cold, sunny day that gets my blood moving and makes me feel great.

Those who have read this blog for a while may know that a few years ago I got the ice skating bug and have been working on my skating and learning to play ice hockey.

This past weekend, while skating with my kids, I had a breakthrough moment — the elusive “backwards crossovers” that I wrote about back in 2016 finally made sense, both to my brain and to my body. It’s like that moment in Night School where Kevin Hart finally manages to make sense of the jumble of mathematical symbols:

It was amazing: somehow I managed to slow things down, connect my brain and my body in the right way, and the move that I just couldn’t master for so long suddenly made sense. It was absolutely a combination of body and mind — understanding it the way as well as feeling it the right way.

This is not a post about ice skating. But rather about the magic that happens when you finally unlock a new skill. It is an amazing feeling, and not something we get to feel every day.

I think there is something particularly important about doing it to get it — it’s one thing to read about something, or watch videos, etc — but nothing substitutes for getting out there and trying it (and falling a few times along the way). This is a lesson I keep reminding myself of whenever I’m trying to learn something new.

I gave this talk at the Blockstack Decentralizing the World Tour in Hong Kong earlier this month: