Stop, Think, Build
[2 minute read] The world seems to be in fast forward mode post-pandemic. Why is that?
FinanceTLDR used to pick a charity to donate to at the start of each month. We’re continuing this tradition and for the month of June, we’re donating to the ALS Association.
As before, don’t feel pressured to join us. We simply ask readers to do a little extra good at the start of this year, whether for a cause you believe in, a friend, a loved one, or even for yourself ❤️
The world feels like it’s in fast forward mode.
In 2020, a global pandemic at unprecedented scale confined billions of people to their homes for almost 2 years. Since the pandemic’s onset, the world has witnessed a cascading series of monumental shifts, encompassing massive geopolitical realignments, profound social transformations, and groundbreaking technological advancements.
Some examples:
There’s a hot war in Europe right now with hostile armor rolling across the plains of Eastern Europe for the first time since World War II. Wait what?
OPEC, a key founding organization behind the petrodollar and a stalwart defender of this Dollar Global Order for the past half-century, is realigning itself with China and Russia.
The Federal Reserve and the US government printed extraordinary amounts of money during the pandemic. The country was then plunged into a severe bout of inflation not seen since the 70’s. In response, the Federal Reserve hiked interest rate at its fastest pace in 40 years, going from 0% to 5% in a year.
One word: unprecedented.
Besides drastic global policy shifts, we’re also experiencing a period of technological acceleration. Since the onset of the pandemic, we saw the rise and fall of NFTs, the rise of EVs across the global auto industry, Ethereum upgrading to Proof of Stake, over 4,000 Starlink satellites launched, Starship close to completion, and most recently, the rise of generative AI heralded by OpenAI’s public release of ChatGPT in November of last year.
There seems to be a new ground-shifting technological fad every few months.
What’s going on, why so fast?
Here’s my meditation on the answer to this nebulous question.
It can be summarized in three words: Stop. Think. Build.
During the lock downs, people were confined in their homes for months on end. There were no social pressures to plan the next party to go to, the next weekend getaway, the next travel destination. The juvenile concept of a hobby didn’t exist. You just did things and there wasn’t a need to prove to anyone that you were interesting.
The home became the confines of a reality where the mind and the hands were the sovereign.
For the powerful policy-makers, the builders, the tinkerers and thinkers of the world, the lock down period was an unprecedented time of uninterrupted creation. An era of accelerated genesis of profound ideas and inventions.
I speak from my own experience. In 2021, I built a start up that was my proudest engineering, product, and marketing achievement. It was a story of long nights, sleepy days, a horizon of unknown unknowns, tens of thousands of lines of code, and an unyielding will to succeed. It also happened to be my biggest failure. I’ll leave the full story for another day.
The point is, what I achieved, although unexpected and personally exceptional, was actually not exceptional during this period of prolonged lock downs. Legions of builders out there embarked on the same journey. If you have an insatiable desire to think and build, and a seemingly endless amount of uninterrupted time, the path of least resistance is to think and build.
And so the world thought and the world built.
This is why I think it feels like fast forward mode right now.