Vipassana meditation is all about achieving a state of thoughtlessness. Total presence. The silencing of the mind, so that we can see — for many people, for the first time — that we are not our inner voice. Sounds crazy. Imagine how it feels. Here’s an overview for anyone considering giving this 2500+ year-old meditation practice a chance to change their lives.

What you’re getting into

Many refer to Vipassana as a ‘retreat’. I did too before I did it. I don’t anymore.

Vipassana was introduced to Indian prisons in the 1980s as a way to help inmates change their ways so that when they return to society, they’re in a better place. There’s a reason several inmates chose Indian prison conditions over the option for a Vipassana ‘retreat’ while locked up.

Similarly, there’s a reason the homeless don’t flood into Vipassana centres, even though they’re totally free — donation based — and offer residents 3x meals a day and a place to sleep.

This is no walk in the park. Expect a challenge and prepare accordingly. Having done some meditation in the past is not a pre-requisite, but a big help.

What is Vipassana?

Vipassana means ‘to see things as they really are’. It is one of India’s most ancient techniques of meditation, taught more than 2500 years ago as a universal remedy for universal ills — an Art of Living.

The technique in a nutshell;

Be absolutely aware,

and do absolutely nothing about it.

To achieve this state of total presence you’re to follow a set of rules and a rigorous schedule.

The 5 Precepts

Abstain from;

1. Killing any being
2. Stealing
3. Sexual misconduct
4. Wrong speech
5. Intoxicants

On top of this, meditators must observe ‘Noble Silence’, from the beginning of the course through to day 10. Noble Silence means silence of body, speech, and mind. Any form of communication with fellow meditators, whether by gestures, sign language, written notes, or anything else, is prohibited.

Universal Daily Schedule

The schedule is the same all over the world and the times are enforced by the ringing of bells. They’re so annoying you’ll start waking up before 4am just to cover your ears. Volunteers will come and fetch you if you oversleep.

You’ll soon realise that the discourse is in many ways the highlight of the day. Mental stimulus and a touch of humour here and there, right before bed.

The ‘BE HAPPY’ at the bottom makes all the difference when you’re up at 4am on day 8 running on 3 and a half hours sleep, nursing a cold and covered in mosquito bites.

Day 0

The beginning was the hardest for me. I was finding every possible reason to tell the taxi to stop and head back. Arriving, being shown to my (prison) cell, and giving up valuables was uncomfortable. But it gets easier.

Days 1–4 — Anapana Meditation

For the first three and a half days you learn the prequel to Vipassana meditation, called Anapana.

Anapana means observation of natural respiration. Many who have practiced some form of meditation have worked with breath before. The difference here is that you already begin training to silence the mind. You’re not supposed to vocalize anything. No ‘in, out’. And you’re not supposed imagine anything, either. No visualizations. Just observe the sensation of the breath as it enters the nose, and goes out again.

Sounds simple, right? Close your eyes and see if you manage more than 20 seconds.

More on Anapana, here.

Days 4–9 — Vipassana Meditation

After three and half days, you begin to learn the Vipassana technique. And after close to 50 hours watching the air enter your nostrils, it couldn’t come soon enough.

Anapana lays the foundations for Vipassana by helping you get into the groove of becoming aware of your sensations without thinking about them. You do this for a small, concentrated area around the nose. Vipassana extends this to the whole body.

I mentioned earlier that the Vipassana technique can be summed up as ‘be absolutely aware, and do absolutely nothing about it’. During days 4 and 9 you’ll learn to observe — with no judgment — everything happening in and to your body, the good and the bad. You’ll hear the words ‘fully aware’ and ‘equanimous’ once or twice.

Many people say day 6 is the hardest. That’s when you’re really left to practice the technique in its fullness, and if you haven’t been following properly in the first few days, that can be tough. But no worries, you’ve got 3 more days to polish your technique.

Day 10 — Metta & Learning how to speak again

Metta is a meditation of gratitude to direct well wishes to all beings in the world. You learn this just before the much-anticipated breaking of the vow of silence.

There was so much peace, harmony, and love flowing between people who had essentially become familiar strangers. It was a little overwhelming, in the most positive sense possible. I’ll never forget walking out of the meditation hall that morning, being greeted by the teachers, with sunrise over the rice fields to my left, and ear-to-ear smiles all round.

Two Key Takeaways

You are not your inner voice

This was the first time I was able to experience my self and my thinking mind as separate entities for an extended period without the influence of intoxicants or medicines. It’s the kind of experience that I’d wish for everyone on earth to have, because it’s so liberating, and because the realization can have profound consequences on the trajectory of your life and those around you.

Buddhists think of ‘thinking’ as the 6th sense, just like smell, taste, and hearing. That is to say that you and what you think you are, are not the same. The inner voice, also referred to as the ego, is a filter through which we experience reality and it is only concerned with the future and the past. A really powerful tool, until it hijacks who we are and becomes us.

Who are we if we are not our inner voice? Think back to a time when you were creative or playing sports — to a state of flow. There were no thoughts. That’s your true self. Through Vipassana, you can train yourself to reconnect with that self and turn off your thoughts.

You need to experience the extremes to know where the middle is

Just as someone who grows up in mid-Siberia might think that 5 degrees celsius is the definition of ‘hot’, if we don’t break out of our daily patterns of thinking and doing, we too can lose track of the balance point. This has definitely been true for me. I’ve been focused on building organizations for over 5 years and Vipassana showed me that I had a completely warped idea of what ‘relaxed’ is.

Living with high anxiety for years can leave you thinking that if you’re not juggling 100 thoughts for a couple of days then you must be rested. Long weekend? Back to normal. But as Gabor Mate points out in his new book ‘The Myth of Normal’, we’ve completely lost track of what normal is.

Vipassana is an opportunity to experience the other extreme. To answer questions like; ‘What’s it like to not be anxious?’, ‘Who am I when I’m not thinking?’, and, ‘Where is my mind?’ — (to the Pixies, if you’re reading this, you finally have your answer).

Location & Cost

There are centres all over the world, and they’re all free. Vipassana is 100% donation-based. The official website for all centres across the globe:

Vipassana Meditation

Tips & Notes

• Even if you become a little disillusioned by what S.N Goenka says, give the practice a fair trial. The practice is the practice, with or without your belief in reincarnation — and the practice brings benefits.
• At some point — either before, at the beginning, or mid-way through, your inner voice is going to jump in and find a thousand reasons why this is stupid, useless, and why you should pack your bags and leave. Push back from a place of positivity by recognising the opportunity in what you’re doing. Finally; total peace and quiet. Finally; no notifications. Finally; no responsibilities, nothing on my shoulders. And in a few days that will all be back — so embrace the moment.
• Choose a centre close to nature and far from urban life. Nature will be all you’ve got for a few days. It can make the low-points more bearable.
• Once you’ve completed a 10 Day Course, you become an ‘Old Student’, and are eligible for 3 day courses, too.
• Practice meditating in the sitting position in the weeks before. It’s true that the pain wears off after a few days, but you might as well get a head start.

Wrapping up

This was the first time I didn’t speak for 10 days in 24 years, and I’d do it again. Was it life-changing?

This seems to be everyone’s first question. I’ve saved it for last.

I saw reality as it really is. I was able to watch my thoughts for a week and half, and see whether they’re in the future or the past, positive or negative, and now I know/confirmed what I crave, what I’m scared of, what I hope for and what I miss — I know where my head’s at.

Vipassana brought a deep sense of inner joy, peace, and clarity like I’ve never experienced. That in itself is life-changing in the short term, but I’m confident that if I act on what I’ve uncovered it will be life-changing in the long run, too. I wish the same for you, too.

If you’d like to talk more about anything above, hit me up on Twitter.

Deus ex-machina is Latin for ‘god from the machine’. It originated as a plot device in Ancient Greek theater. The hero would find themselves trapped, facing certain death, only to be saved at the very last moment by the gods. The gods would be lowered to the stage with the help of a machine, hence, god from the machine. The plot device has been used ever since.

Today, deus ex-machina is taking on a new meaning. Ernest Becker wrote in his 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, ‘The Denial of Death’, that ‘humans are gods with anuses’. What he meant by this was that despite our transcendent hopes, dreams and aspirations, we are biological mortals. We are gods made from flesh and bone, limited by flesh and bone. This may be true of us, but it is not true of our creations, our machines.

With tools, humans created machines. And with those machines we created more machines. Now, our machines are ‘smart’. They are artificially intelligent. Soon, they will be smarter than we are. We are on a path to creating gods from machines. The train has left the station and it’s not coming back. What exactly this means for humanity is unknown, but we do know that there are stops along the way, chances to guide the trajectory. Web3 is our first and arguably most important chance.

We’re creating gods from machines

We know what the graph looks like. We know it’s a question of ‘when’ not ‘if’.

The age of automation is here. We’re transitioning from an age where humans did all the work to an age where machines do all the work — and more. Machines can create more value than humans, in more ways, more efficiently, and will also create value for one another. The pie is getting bigger — but it is also changing hands, from flesh to steel.

How many jobs have machines already taken? How many of jobs will machines be doing by 2030?

By recent estimates, anything from 5% to 35% of jobs per country are on course to be automated. To be clear, machines automating certain tasks and roles is not in itself a bad thing. Many of these tasks are of the repetitive, mundane sort that the people doing them would happily stop doing if it didn’t mean they’d be left with no income. The unemployment spikes resulting from overnight mass automation will cause problems, but there is a bigger issue; ownership.

The question we should be asking ourselves is not how do we stop this? We can’t. The question we should be asking ourselves is;

Who will benefit?

Who will own these increasingly intelligent machines? The 1% or the 100%? The decisions we take now will mould humanity, earth, and even our solar system.

Who will benefit?

Perhaps humanity needs a deus ex-machina moment of its own. Perhaps we’ve already got one; in Satoshi Nakamoto. The unknown creator of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is hope, hope that we can do things differently. The Web3 revolution, from blockchain to DeFi to NFTs, all stems from Bitcoin. Indeed, everything you read where Web3 is concerned is rooted in Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer, decentralized, electronic cash system.

Web3 allows us to build open, transparent, democratic, decentralized systems, networks and economies.

You’re no doubt aware of the growing inequality in our societies, of what happens when innovation is kept behind high walls, of what happens when we don’t own our data or control our digital identities, and the perils of economic systems which prioritise engineered scarcity over distributed abundance.

Web3 is our chance to change this trajectory. Smart machines are here and they are getting smarter. Web3 makes it possible to distribute ownership of these machines and the systems and infrastructure they run on. Web3 is the toolbox we need to build a machine economy that works for all people and machines. And so, there you have it, that’s peaq’s vision. That’s what we’re building towards.

A decentralized machine economy that works for the world.

This post focused on where we’re heading — but in case you’re wondering — the machine economy is already here:

What Machine dApps can you build on peaq today?

Follow peaq on our community channels to stay in the loop.

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Originally published on www.peaq.network

Why the Machine Economy must be built on Web3 was originally published in peaq on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Tesla announced plans for a humanoid robot called Optimus, which will be able to do "dangerous, repetitive and boring", such as providing manufacturing assistance.

Meanwhile, the metaverse allows people to control avatars in the digital world and see, feel and hear what they do. Smell and taste are coming.

What if put them together?

Will it be possible to control a humanoid in the real world, remotely from anywhere via the metaverse?

Will it be possible to do anything, go anywhere, without human limitations, from our own homes?

The metaverse is currently advanced, but not quite there yet. But the metaverse in 25 or 50 years? There is little doubt that it will eventually be indistinguishable from real life.

Humanoids are currently limited by all kinds of things. Regulation is an obvious one. But in 50 years? 100?

Where would this leave us on the cyborg spectrum?

If the experience in the metaverse is indistinguishable from reality, and humanoids are able to all things a human can and more, would we be able to live out meningful existences as nothing more than brains in jars? Does that have any implications on immortality? At what point is the entity no longer human?

Lots of questions. Few answers. What do you think?

Universal Basic Income (UBI) is a recurring income given to all citizens of a nation by their government. It is probably the most ambitious socio-economic concept of our time.

Universal Basic Ownership (UBO) is an alternative to Universal Basic Income made possible by Web3, the next generation of the web in which people can verifiably own assets on the internet.

UBO grants people ownership over the value generated by autonomous machines, vehicles, robots, and devices that take human jobs. It ties income received by people to the rate at which machines take jobs. The more jobs machines take, the more people earn.

This article serves to introduce the idea of Universal Basic Ownership (UBO). It is a request for constructive criticism, feedback, collaboration and research partners. You can get in touch on Twitter, @MaxThake.

Background

Why do we need universal basic anything?

The concept of Universal Basic Income (UBI) has gained popularity and notoriety in equal part over the past decade. It has been pitched as a solution to poverty and inequality, in addition to being positioned as a way to maintain income in the event that intelligent machines take over many of today’s jobs.

In this piece I’ll be focusing on what happens when Artificial Intelligence (AI) meets machines, vehicles, robots, and devices to create intelligent machines — the dawn of the Age of Automation.

I see the Age of Automation as the core driver of our need to act. Not because poverty and inequality aren’t issues, but because intelligent machines will make those problems far greater if not addressed at the root. Automation is one of the biggest potential threats to global socio-economic stability.

“I think we’ll end up doing universal basic income. It’s going to be necessary. There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better. I want to be clear. These are not things I wish will happen; these are things I think probably will happen.”

— Elon Musk

We’re transitioning from an age where humans did all the work to an age where machines do all the work — and more. The pie is getting bigger — machines can create more value than humans, in more ways, more efficiently. Not just that, a new economy altogether is emerging in parallel — the Machine-to-Machine (M2M) economy, where machines create value for themselves and one another.

So the pie is getting bigger — but it is also changing hands, from flesh to steel. The question we should be asking ourselves is not how do we stop this? (we can’t) — but;

Who will benefit? The 1% or the 100%?

Note: This article is making the educated assumption that machines becoming increasingly intelligent and taking an increasing amount of jobs over the next years is inevitable.

The Age of Automation is already here

The OECD had estimated that 14% of jobs were at high risk of automation. These estimates varied significantly across countries (from 6.5% in Norway to 34.6% in the Slovak Republic) as well as across occupations, ranging from 1.1% for chief executives and senior officials and legislators to 50.1% for food preparation assistants.

It is estimated that autonomous cars alone could eliminate 300,000 driving jobs per year, according to a May 2017 report from Goldman Sachs. That’s 300,000 jobs every year lost to one type of autonomous machine, in one country, in one year — every year.

Once again, science fiction is becoming science fact, and even though we’ve watched this unravel on the big screen and flicked through countless novels — we are unprepared. We’re caught in semi-sentient headlights.

Uber cars will arrive without drivers.

Amazon packages will be delivered by drone.

Starbucks coffees will be made without baristas.

McDonalds burgers will be made without chefs.

Humanoid robots will mine, educate, entertain — and so much more.

It will happen, and it has already begun. Imagine the uproar when it happens at scale. No government wants millions of jobless people, so as things stand governments are incentivized to halt innovation. If innovation is an issue, I personally believe the system is broken.

This is a crisis. A large crisis. In fact, if you’ve got a moment, it’s a twelve-story crisis with a magnificent entrance hall, carpeting throughout, 24-hour portage, and an enormous sign on the roof, saying ‘This Is a Large Crisis’. And a large crisis requires a large plan.

A Large Plan

Universal Basic Income (UBI)

UBI is the most ambitious social policy of our time. It is considered an alternative to welfare, although there’s still disagreement on what UBI actually is or should be. The idea is to keep society intact while also keeping the free market intact. To distribute wealth more evenly, to preserve peace, to solve the disparity between rich and poor and to have a constant source of income as machines automate jobs. Great in theory — but in practice?

The problems with this solution

1. UBI may replace multiple targeted welfare agencies with one agency. it is not yet clear if this would be positive or negative.
2. If UBI replaces multiple welfare agencies with one, a huge dependency on that agency will emerge, resulting in a huge concentration of power and leverage.
3. Redistribution of wealth is widely unpopular, and likely wouldn’t work.
4. New taxes are highly unpopular in many political climates. We witnessed this unpopularity in the US, when Andrew Yang, for example, proposed a new VAT tax to cover the $3.5 trillion cost of handing out all American adults $1000 a month.
5. UBI is skeuomorphic — it aims to solve current/future problems with past technologies. It does not take emerging technologies into account.

I could go on, but here’s a 5minute interview with former UBI-promoter Douglas Rushkoff to summarise the arguments against Universal Basic Income:

‘UBI becomes a way of perpetuating our roles as consumers, at the bottom of the pyramid, not as owners.

If we’re going to go to anything I would say what about universal basic assets?

What about actual participation? What if the workers owned the means of production? So you don’t just give them a handout so the money ends up in the same corporate coffers and going into the same shares.

What universal basic income does, if you look at the whole model, is it allows the people who own the lion’s share of our world to own more of it.’

- Douglas Rushkoff

New Web. New Possibilities.

UBI is as controversial as it is ambitious. In my view, in light of the emergence of Web3, it is also far too one-dimensional. UBI represents us looking to emerging technologies and being afraid of what they enable, rather than looking to emerging technologies for answers and progress. UBI is a remedy to a present and future problem, using past technology.

More than that, I believe UBI is far too closely tied to our view of the world in the 20th century, and despite it often being suggested as a necessary thing for the future, it does not take into account that the cause of the problem — technology — can also be the solution. Universal Basic Ownership seeks to rectify that.

With UBO, the technology of choice is blockchain. Blockchain is at the heart of Web3, the decentralized, community-governed era of the internet we are fast moving into.

Web3 enables us to verifiably own assets on the internet.
Web3 enables Universal Basic Ownership.

Introducing Universal Basic Ownership (UBO)

Universal Basic Ownership (UBO) grants people the right to earn a percentage of revenue generated by the machines, vehicles, robots and devices that automate jobs.

It is a share in the Web3 Machine Economy. A share in the decentralized applications (dApps) that enable intelligent, autonomous machines to provide services to people and other machines.

Unlike a share in a company however, this is a share which exists on the blockchain which you own and control, tied to your unique digital identity which also exists on the blockchain, which you own and control.

Right now, the autonomous machines being developed by manufacturers are owned only by the big enterprises creating them. These large corporations, building these machines, currently stand to be the only ones to profit from them taking jobs. The amount of data, influence and power they stand to amass in doing this will make the Facebook — Cambridge Analytica scandal seem cute.

The system I’m proposing would see us disrupt the Big Tech model and replace it with one of shared ownership, where businesses and individuals can have a share in owning these machines. This idea will replace monopolies with decentralized collectives.

Comparison: UBI vs. UBO

* subject to inflation
** this is not the case for all UBI programs, just the most heavily discussed.

How universal is universal?

Before diving deeper into Universal Basic Income — what do we actually mean by universal? When talking about UBI, in reality there’s no such thing as universal, there’s national at best. ‘Universal’ is just catchier.

Now, Web3 does not care for national borders, Web3 just needs an internet connection. As of January 2021 there were 4.66 billion active internet users worldwide — 59.5 percent of the global population. So even where Web3 is concerned, ‘universal’ is limited.

Web3 networks like peaq’s make ownership of assets via the internet accessible to everyone with an internet connection. What matters most in the context of the autonomous age is; who. Who should get UBO, and who should give it?

With UBO, it is likely to be possible to hyper-target it; the more machines take jobs and income streams within a given community, the more the community earns in revenue from those same machines. It gives people a direct income stream from intelligent machines. The more machines do, the more jobs they take — the richer, not poorer, we become.

How does UBO work?

UBO works using Non-Fungible Tokens, or NFTs. NFTs are unique digital tokens (assets) that exist on the internet. They can be used to represent and verify ownership over digital assets such as art or music, or ownership rights over virtually anything.

Machine NFTs are like shares in the Web3 machine economy. If you own a Machine NFT, you own the right to earn from the revenue generated by machines on the network.

In the Web3 machine economy, apps which use machines to provide an intermediary service, like Uber, Deliveroo and virtually anything else, are replaced by dApps (decentralized applications) that are community built, community governed and community owned, run on decentralized networks. The money generated from these dApps ends up in the hands of all stakeholders, of anyone holding Machine NFTs, via the network they’re built on. The community-run network — in this case peaq — would put aside a % for UBO.

Example

Let’s take the Uber example.

• Taxi drivers today decide they want to make money with their car by signing up and working for Uber.
• A ‘Decentralized Uber’ — let’s call it Undo-ber — will follow a similar sign up process for a new driver as Uber— but the driver won’t be working for a Big Tech’s app, they’ll be working for a community-built dApp.
• Undo-ber will allow drivers and users to own a piece of the dApp/machines and vote on how the dApp is built, designed, upgraded.
• Undo-ber will allow drivers and users to earn in more lucrative ways while remaining in full control of their data.
• When autonomous machines enter the market, the community (including the displaced drivers) gets to own, govern and earn from these machines instead of corporations. Crucially, this means that the out-of-work driver is still earning, based on the fact that the car they own (or a new, intelligent one) is still driving.

UBO could grant taxi drivers a share in the autonomous taxis that take their jobs. What if we could apply that across all jobs that intelligent, autonomous machines take?

Notes:

• Before autonomous machines really take over, it’s more self-governing communities of people using machines, peer-to-peer, as the core focus in terms of the shift Web3 enables (no more big tech).
• Machine NFTs are core to the concept of Universal Basic Ownership. If you’d like to take a deeper dive, this piece should bring you up to scratch.
• We are also exploring how Machine NFTs and DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) can be used to give people governance rights over the machines in their communities.

The case for UBO — in a nutshell

1. The autonomous age is here. Machines are becoming the primary workforce — there’s no stopping it. The question is, will the 1% control and earn from intelligent machines, or the 100%?
2. The more jobs machines take, the more people end up unemployed and without income.
3. Universal Basic Income (UBI) aims to solve this problem by giving everyone a constant source of income, mainly via additional tax revenue.
4. Universal Basic Ownership (UBO) aims to solve this problem by granting people ownership over the autonomous machines that take their jobs.
5. UBO ties income received by people to the rate at which machines take jobs. The more jobs (income %) machines take, the more people earn.
6. UBO is gradual, dynamic, flexible and does not necessarily rely on governments or corporations — it relies on the internet.

‘The 21st century doesn’t belong to China, the United States, or Silicon Valley. It belongs to the internet.’

— Foreign Policy

Summary and next steps

This article was intended to introduce you to the idea of Universal Basic Ownership (UBO). Much more research is needed and underway. The potential is huge. We’re asking and answering questions like;

• What are the implications of giving machines (sentient and not) Machine NFTs, too?
• If machines do tasks cheaper than humans — won’t the pie get smaller?
• Will machines really take all the work in the long term? What is work?

And more.

To top this off I should double down on the fact that this is one of many things that peaq enables — not peaq’s core purpose. peaq is a Web3 network economy for people to build machine-related dApps on. peaq is an enabler. It is the people who use it and who build on it who decide whether to build or enable an idea like this. I am simply putting this idea out there because I believe we have an opportunity to leverage this technology for positive impact on a global, trans-generational scale.

If you also see potential in this idea and you’re interested in collaborating on — and who knows — maybe shaping a generation or two, you can get in touch on Twitter at @MaxThake.

“There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is an idea whose time has come.”

– Victor Hugo

The history and evolution of the internet up until this point and how the Web3 is going to change everything — again — is a long story worth telling in detail. In this piece I summarise it as simply as possible.

… this piece has been moved to peaq’s blog:

https://www.peaq.network/blog/whats-web3

Think weeks were first popularised by Bill Gates in the Netflix documentary “Inside Bill’s Brain" in 2019, but Billy G has been going on solo research retreats since the ‘80s.

This is a think week how-to guide. Stress on the “a” — because ultimately a think week should cater to your own needs. There’s no set format. That being said, there are some general rules of thumb, better-nots, and ideas worth trying. After reading lots of blogs that give a lot of context but not enough actionable advice, I’m attempting to fill the void by passing on what works for me in the hope that it can help you spend a little less time thinking about how to take a think week, and more time think-weeking.

What’s a Think Week?

In its simplest form, a Think Week is a week dedicated to thinking. Bet you didn’t see that coming.

The Bill Gates definition is: a week devoted to reading up on important topics, twice a year. It’s a good place to start. After all, it’s the original, and also where Internet Explorer was born. But Bill also had his cabin pre-stacked with Diet Coke and Orange Crush. So, similar to Internet Explorer — there’s room for improvement.

I like to split my think week between business and personal goals. I set one business goal and one personal goal and then head out into the middle of nowhere to research, ask questions, get creative, write, reflect, detach, plan, strategise, and get into flow. Dedicated time for deep work.

‘I know what you’re thinking — who can afford to take a whole week off from work? I look at my Think Weeks as a solution to what I call the “execution trap.” We stay really busy to keep moving the ball forward on our ideas. But what happens when we move the ball in the wrong direction? The busier you are, the more you can’t afford not to take a Think Week.’

— Michael Karnjanaprakorn, Founder of Skillshare

Why go on a Think Week?

There’s definitely more than one reason. Bill did it to collect his thoughts on important topics twice a year. I’ve read a lot about people going on Think Weeks solely for self-development purposes. It’s up to you. Ask yourself; ‘if I could dedicate seven days to one topic with no distractions, what would have the biggest impact on my life/career?’.

I love being able to dive into a topic head-first for days on end with no chance of disruption or distraction. Think weeks allow me to dedicate time to big ideas which need to be developed and analysed from different perspectives. There’s something about sticking with an idea for long periods which allows you to join more dots in better ways, sometimes leading to hacks, shortcuts, and considering things your competition hasn’t — and there are things you can do to maximise the chances of that happening. More on that soon.

“People should have a ‘third place’ that isn’t work or home, where they can find focused time to think and create and clarify your strategic thinking. We must create an environment that gives us the ability to focus our minds without interruption from coworkers, spouses, children, pets, and technology, or we’ll never be able to concentrate on higher-order activities.”

— Laura Stack, The Productivity Pro, on Think Weeks

How to take a Think Week

How you take your think week depends on why you’re taking it. There is no set menu. Bill keeps it really simple. He blocks a week, takes a pile of research papers, heads to a cabin where no one can reach him and just goes at them all day and night, interspersed with walks to think about what he’s reading.

And that’s really the core of it. Book a place somewhere quiet, make sure you can’t be disturbed, set your goals and go.

If you’re anything like me though, you need a better idea of how you’re going to spend your think week before dedicating a whole seven days to it. I’ll go into a bit more detail on what works for me and what doesn’t below.

Where to go?

Location, place, and setting are critical to a good think week. Going anywhere new to work is great for creativity, but if you can find a place in nature where you can’t be disturbed, you’ve already covered most bases. Given the choice, I’d go for an isolated cabin far enough from the nearest village to have total peace and quiet, but close enough to be able to walk there if I need anything.

If you’re in Germany, these guys curate unique stays ideal for think weeks:

• https://www.raus.life/
• https://www.staycationcollection.com

‘When people disconnect and place themselves in an environment free from the internet, co-workers, meetings, and other office distractions, they can clear away mental clutter and truly focus their thoughts. Going to a new location can also increase creativity and inspire new ideas by virtue of being in a different environment with fresh inputs.’

When to go?

Bill goes twice a year. Six months give him enough, but not too much, material to cover over the week. Some people go more often than that. See what kind of weather you prefer and see when it fits best with work, that’s about it.

And if you’re too busy to take one, then you should probably take one.

Who to go with?

Three is a crowd. Two can work. But I’d definitely advocate going solo to get the most out of your think week. It puts you in full control of your plan, routine, and to a large extent — thoughts.

Think before you think

Half the think week is in how you prepare for it. It might sound tempting to just dive in, but it’s not a holiday. It makes sense to dedicate a day or at least an evening to setting your goals and planning each day of your think week in advance to get the most value possible out of it. And the earlier you book a place the better.

Set a goal, maybe two

I like to set one big business goal and one big personal goal. Things I know need time to be properly explored. I then intentionally shuffle between business and personal goals on alternate days, to give space for ideas to ruminate. Sometimes going totally off-topic can join dots that no amount of focused work can. Having these goals makes you accountable for achieving them while not overloading you with pressure to execute like any other day at the office.

The goals for my last think week (at the time of writing) were 1) read the 5 year plan I wrote in 2017 and write a 10 year plan and 2) refine and simplify our company narrative so that it passes the grandma test.

Plan, but don’t over-plan

I’ve read lots of articles by people who tried to take a think week but bit off more than they could chew and left feeling overwhelmed. A one-sentence to-do for each day is enough. To avoid getting overwhelmed while still getting the most out of your week, set goals, plan your days out and choose your input — and lack of.

I plan my days in advance to include time for research, for writing, podcasts, audiobooks, interviews, meditation, and time to just think — normally while walking.

A note on notes

I find myself taking notes all day, everywhere. With no input from apps or work or anything, when my mind wanders it wanders on topics relevant to my goals, and I take notes on my phone — convenient and easy to copy-paste onto documents and decks. Take a journal and pen if you prefer.

Limit input to inspire creativity

Good ideas don’t just pop into your head (that’s a myth). Creativity needs boundaries. Setting goals and planning out your days to break down those goals is a great start.

I like to structure my days to go between three states of mind; focused input, focused output, and free output. The cycle between them creates the conditions for creativity to flourish— similar to why I dedicate alternate days to business and work, just on a day scale.

Focused input = example; reading a research paper.
Focused output = example; writing a video script.
Free output = example; ideas while on a nature walk.

‘Free input’ is what you want to avoid. The best example is social media — which is basically other people telling you what to think.

Digital detox

Nothing limits input better than a digital detox. With all social apps deleted, Do-Not-Disturb on and in the middle of nowhere, you can fully disconnect. You can just be.

If you’re going to take anything from this article, take this. The weight off your shoulders and clarity of thought it allows make it easily the most effective think week practice. Just let people know beforehand and make yourself contactable for emergencies.

A do-nothing day

I like to plan in a do-nothing day as my day one. No goals. No input. A full day to settle down, settle in, detach and see where my mind is at. I plan my walking routes the night before, take notes if anything worth noting comes up and meditate every few hours.

Meditation

I like to meditate at least three times a day on think weeks compared to once a day on normal days. It sets the tone in the morning and then stills the mind after long thinking, writing and planning sessions. You can focus your meditation on all kinds of relevant topics like solitude, appreciation or prioritisation using Headspace.

Mental Health App for Meditation & Sleep - Headspace

Nature Walks

I plan nature walks into every day. It’s another form of meditation in which you can clear the mind, watch and guide your thoughts and let ideas flow — notepad in hand.

More on the effects of nature walks on your mind and work here.

Fasting

I’ve been intermittent fasting (16–8) for for over two years and I’m working towards the one meal a day for reasons Jack Dorsey and David Sinclair highlight here and here.

It’s another bio-hack you can use to further focus the mind, but better do your research first. It also doesn’t make sense to just do it on the think week, you need to build it up and get used to it beforehand.

What about a Think Weekend?

Im against the idea of ‘think days’ or think weekends. Technically you could do one, but I don’t think they fall under the same category in terms of effect and potential. You need time to set yourself, to set your mind to disconnect mode and to have the time to do proper digging and creating.

I’ll readily acknowledge that a week in a cabin, in the middle of nowhere, alone, is some peoples’ idea of hell on earth. To each his own. But it’s worked for Billy G and since its recent popularisation, for a lot of other people too.

Further Reading:

• Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide
• Cal Newport
• Why Every Leader Needs to Take a Think Week | Hacker Noon
• Why You Should Go on a 'Think Week' (Hint: It's All About the Books)
• Bill Gates’ Think Week Practice Can Help Boost Your Creativity and Focus Your Mind
• Bill Gates took solo 'think weeks' in a cabin in the woods-why it's a great strategy
• In the 1980s, Bill Gates would escape to a secret cabin in the woods to protect himself from burnout. Here's the modern-day, easier version of his approach.

Bitcoin was born out of the need for a peer-to-peer, digital cash system. The need for a decentralized monetary system which does not need humans to maintain it.

Necessity is the mother of invention, but it is also the mother of adoption, and since the 2008 financial crisis adoption of cryptocurrencies has skyrocketed. Investing in digital currencies, especially around 2017, appealed to so many because it seemed to be an opportunity to make a lot of money very quickly, and like most get-rich-quick schemes, many people lost a lot of money, very quickly.

Many in the crypto-space tried to defend the sell-off in 2018 by denying it was a bubble at all. Possibly out of fear that labelling it a bubble would in some way undermine the legitimacy of digital currency in general.

Was it a bubble? Of course it was. Does that mean all digital currencies are scams or ponzi schemes? Of course not.

In the same way the dotcom bubble burst in the early 2000s, only to bounce back bigger, stronger, more refined than ever, we can expect digital currencies to do the same. The difficulty lies in figuring out which the Amazons and Googles will be this time.

Satoshi Nakamoto is perhaps similar to the Wright brothers, the inventors of the first power-driven airplane, in that he solved the unsolvable. Who’d have thought in the early 1900s, that we’d have 700,000 people in the sky at any moment just one century later?

Similarly, will paper money exist 20 years from now? Digital currencies will bounce back from the 2018 crash and it’s not difficult to foresee a shift towards digital cash in the near future. What is hard to foresee, however, is that digital cash being bitcoin.

Bitcoin was created as a peer-to-peer digital cash system, but despite a brief stint as some people’s choice as cash in the early days, it’s unlikely to live out its original purpose. It has navigated all kinds of regulatory hurdles, public perception nightmares and bubble bursts but it’s also encountered some seriously damaging limitations along the way.

High transaction fees, dangerous miner politics and exorbitant power demands to list a few, make its proposition as the digital cash of tomorrow a weak one. That being said, given its uncanny ability to bounce back from the depths, I wouldn’t write off bitcoin just yet. Bitcoin is still a great option in terms of a store of value, a ‘digital gold’ if you will, and there is still technically room for further development.

Whatever comes of bitcoin at this point though, is secondary. It may not live out Satoshi’s original electronic cash dream but one thing is for sure, it will be the root of much, much more. Whether it lives on as digital gold, as the precursor for more technologically sound digital currencies or through its underlying technology — blockchain, bitcoin can be regarded as a successful failure, possibly the most successful failure ever.

It’s an example of the incredible power we all possess to make an impact, and the potential we have to amplify that impact globally. The power to truly be the change we want to see in the world — whether we choose to take the plaudits for it or not.

What’s next?

The next wave in the digital age would seem just as baffling to our ancestors as it will be to many of us such is the speed at which it’s unfolding. The idea that a person, business or device can send or trade a digital representation of anything of value, to anywhere in the world, instantly, with no possibility of it being hacked, will raise many eyebrows. Yet this is the the global economy we are heading towards.

Digital currencies can be used to define virtually any form of value and can be exchanged for any other digital currency, representing any other form of value. At present, a dollar can’t be directly exchanged for a Facebook like, your leftover hardware storage can’t be directly exchanged for someone else’s loyalty points and the extra electricity you generated with your solar panels can’t be directly exchanged for a room in an apartment building. All that, and any other form of token exchange will be both possible and easily accessible. As will the ability to specify precisely how a token will function.

Since digital currencies are essentially lines of code, they are programmable, allowing us to create specific rules for them to follow when exchanged or converted. We can impose constraints or free up all kinds of possibilities with regards to how they can be used.

For instance, a token could be programmed so that it can’t be exchanged for diamonds that are mined in locations known for their use of slave labour. In this way the token is not just a utility but also something that expresses social values, changing our economy from a single value model to a multi-value model where many different types of value and micro-economies can be created, while maintaining the possibility for instant exchange.

On a superficial level, digital currencies have evolved from an idea to a multi-trillion dollar industry. But look a bit deeper and you’ll see diverse communities of entrepreneurs, investors, ideologists, doers and believers who have nurtured the idea of a digital currency from a dream to a movement, to an industry that is transforming our economies, the markets we form part of, and our day-to-day lives.

And yet despite their huge predicted impact, digital currencies are just one part of a bigger thing. They’re the result of a shift going on at the base level — a shift towards decentralized systems — as entire industries and markets begin to adopt Distributed Ledger Technology. They represent the economic element of a global shift towards decentralization, a shift towards a new era. A shift from dependence on centralized authorities to global networks that follow distributed consensus models managed by the masses, by us.

The most far-reaching accomplishment of Satoshi Nakamoto and bitcoin was to introduce us to blockchain / Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT).

DLT, in its many shapes and sizes, is transforming what began as an economic experiment into a full-scale societal revolution that will permeate every nook and cranny of our world.

The internet has barely been around for twenty years and it’s completely changed the way we behave and interact. It’s had an obvious effect on the way we exchange value and ideas, speeding up processes and shortening distances.

But the internet is far from perfect, as you’ve probably realised. We still don’t know if people are who they say they are, we have no means of verifying information and our data and identities are far from secure.

Verifiability, authenticity and trust on the internet still elude us.

Technology is constantly evolving though and every now and then it takes a giant leap forward. DLT is one such leap.

DLT is a secure way of structuring, sending and storing data online. Its primary breakthroughs are that it allows information online to be distributed but not copied, introducing the idea of scarcity to the digital world, while also being decentralized — not owned or controlled by any one entity.

For the first time, information and value can be distributed around the world without the risk of it being copied, forged or tampered with and without the need for it to be controlled or channelled through intermediaries.

The responsibility to maintain and validate data is put in the hands of the users, and the result is a secure, transparent, immutable, incorruptible, system of data registry (or ledger).

Despite being around for over a decade, the technology is still some way away from being considered mature. It took a while for news of its creation through bitcoin to spread, and even longer for people to notice its potential beyond the world of finance.

But now there’s a race underway. A race to bring this new technology to the masses and to really set the revolution in motion. There are plenty of people working on bringing the technology to the real world. Every day, new use cases are being envisioned and put to the test and once rolled out at scale, the effect they will have on the way we behave an interact will be profound.

It’s becoming clearer and clearer that no stone will be left unturned by DLT. Everything from finance to production, mobility, health, entertainment, real estate, education, energy and even government, will feel the effects.

DLT creates opportunities for organisations to embrace decentralization, and although that may sound counter-intuitive to some, the improvements in terms of security, efficiency and ultimately bottom-line, make it impossible to ignore. Creating ecosystems and societies where there is no need for third-party reliance or interference, a notion which was central to the first blockchain, is still a core driver of developments in the space.

We can expect the DLT revolution to be spearheaded by organizations, corporations, institutions and startups. One just hopes that Satoshi’s initial digital decentralization dream doesn’t get lost along the way.

In the months and years to come, organisations and people alike can expect to conducting virtually any transfer of value instantly and directly. With increased uptake of this technology we are also likely to witness increased transparency and accessibility, greater user empowerment, enhanced security and the solving of big issues such as data manipulation and security online.

Ultimately we can expect processes in work and life to be conducted with guaranteed integrity, and our societies to be drastically simplified.

In the same way most people who use the internet are interested in what it does rather than how it does it, the technological genius behind blockchain will go unnoticed.

So where are we heading? In short, a new economy. The internet has altered the world immeasurably, making things our ancestors would have considered impossible not just viable, but commonplace. We can communicate over vast distances in seconds, access all kinds of information and order, pay and have anything from a bottle of water to a semi-autonomous vehicle delivered practically anywhere, all from a handheld device.

DLT is the missing building block of the internet — the trust protocol. The addition of a trust layer, of a consensus feature, will completely change the digital world as we know it today. It will give us a way to be sure of our information and data, eliminate the possibility of fraud and corruption, write self-executing smart contracts with each-other and send value of all kinds directly to one another, instantly and without borders.

Given how the internet has changed the world, you would not be blamed for thinking DLT could do the same. And since DLT has the plumbing of the internet to build on, the change may come around much faster now that it’s finally taken centre stage. It will change the way we behave and interact on a fundamental level, just as the internet did.

A world where distributed autonomous institutions are the new order of the day. A world where uncertainties are converted to predictable, verifiable certainty. A world in which trust, for the large part, is no longer a human interaction, but an in-built protocol.

In the words of a good friend and inventor of Ethereum’s Whisper Protocol, Guillaume Ballet;

‘DLT offers the possibility to build organizations in which you don’t need to trust anyone. That’s almost magic to me. It will take a long time for society to adapt — if it ever does — yet I’m starry-eyed when I think of a world where people aren’t so scared of other people … because they don’t have to be.’

A technology powerful enough to disrupt society’s longest standing institutions, markets and economies.

People have always looked for ways to reduce uncertainty between one another when exchanging value. Unfortunately abstract trust is not enough to ensure an exchange will go smoothly. As trade mushroomed from an act between individuals in small communities to an intricate process involving multiple entities all over the world, we’ve had to find ways of keeping track of it all. We resorted to recording our transactions so as to reduce dependence on trust, and those records have been stored on ledgers since the days of the first trades.

Ledgers are the foundations of accounting. They are systems by which people can establish who owns what, who has what, and who owes what to whom. While the concept has remained the same, the medium used to record transactions has varied over time and through technological advances. From clay tablets to papyrus, books to computers, the goal has always been to keep records as efficiently and effectively as possible. Humans have been maintaining ledgers for thousands of years, and while the medium and methods have changed over time, one element of ledger-keeping has not. From Mesopotamia to McGladrey, a third party party has always had to register and oversee transactions and maintain accounts. This makes sense as it provides the basis for validation, and allows people conducting a trade of value to have a basis by which to trust one another.

Our modern economy is filled to the brim with middlemen whose primary purpose it is to keep record of exchanges of value. To maintain and update ledgers. They do a very important job, for we can only really own something if there is agreement — consensus — that we own that thing. Ownership is set by social agreement, and that agreement needs to be held somewhere. Yet, as long as that record is kept somewhere, it must also be in the hands of someone, and with that responsibility comes a great deal of power. The growth of global trade and commerce has led to the creation of a vast network of ledger systems, which are vulnerable to downtime, corruption, misinterpretation and fraud, the repercussions of which can be catastrophic.

But what if we didn’t have to trust institutions to maintain our ledgers? What if we could put those ledgers online and decentralize them? What if money was no longer printed or controlled? We’re on the cusp of another revolution. One that goes far beyond the realm of finance and accounting. A breakthrough of colossal proportions. The question of trust between trading, collaborating and competing parties may no longer be an issue, thanks to Distributed Ledger Technology.

Blockchain is the lifeblood of the first cryptocurrency, bitcoin. It’s the most popular form of Distributed Ledger Technology or DLT, and the first ledger to eliminate the need for a central authority. The first ledger to eliminate the need for trust in single, centralised person or institution. It does this by distributing information previously held in a centralised ledger across a decentralized network — a network with no central point of power or control. It’s a governance technology. A trust protocol.

No one person or company owns a DLT— it is leveraged, maintained and verified by all who are incentivised to use it. Whether that DLT is used to record currency, trade, identity or anything else is down to its creators. The magic behind it all is its ability to maintain consensus between collaborating and competing parties without having to rely on any one person. The result is a decentralized system of data registry where transactions are transparent, reliable and incorruptible — and yes, it’s as big as it sounds.

Proof-of-Work (PoW) was the first blockchain consensus mechanism and is still arguably the most popular choice in achieving distributed consensus (the ability to trust a stranger without having to go through a third-party).

PoW is used by the likes of Bitcoin and Ethereum (for now) and several other cryptocurrencies. Strong as it may be, it comes with disadvantages like high computation requirements, high energy costs and the threat of centralisation-by-mining-pool.

Once you understand PoW and its downfalls, the need for a system like Proof-of-Stake (PoS) becomes clear.

But first — what’s a stake?

In crypto-terms, the stake is the cryptocurrency a user owns and pledges in order to partake in validation — more on that soon.

How does Proof-of-Stake work?

A one sentence description tends to be a good starting to point when trying to explain complex ideas. So in short:

Proof-of-Stake algorithms achieve consensus by requiring users to stake an amount of their tokens so as to have a chance of being selected to validate blocks of transactions, and get rewarded for doing so.

PoS shares many similarities with PoW, but also differs in fundamental ways. As in any blockchain based consensus algorithm, the goal is still to achieve distributed consensus — to create a secure system whereby users are incentivised to validate other peoples’ transactions while maintaining complete integrity.

In PoS the miner of a new block, in this case known as the forger, is chosen in a semi-random, two-part process. The first element to be considered in this selection process is a user’s stake. How much of the currency in question is the user staking?

Every validator must own a stake in the network. Staking involves depositing an amount of tokens into the system, locking it in what you can think of as a virtual safe, and using it as a collateral to vouch for the block.

The more a user stakes, the better their chance of being selected since they’d have more skin in the game — acting maliciously would see them set back by a greater amount than someone who stakes less.

In the majority of PoS consensus algorithms, the incentive to partake in validation of blocks is a payout in the form of transaction fees, as opposed to freshly created currency in PoW systems.

Not much is random about that first part, in fact it’s probably got you thinking that PoS is ripe to be abused by the wealthy. The key here is to include a degree of chance to the selection process so as to avoid a scenario where the richest users are always selected to validate transactions, consistently reap the rewards and grow richer and richer.

The second element adds the ‘random’ to the semi-random selection process, although the way in which this is done differs from blockchain to blockchain. The two most commonly used methods are Randomised Block Selection and Coin Age Selection.

In Randomised Block Selection, forgers are selected by looking for users with a combination of the lowest hash value and highest stakes. The Coin Age Selection method chooses validators based on how long their tokens have been staked for. These are by no means the only methods of selecting validators, though. Some currencies combine the aforementioned methods while others are experimenting with their own.

Another difference worth noting between PoW and PoS, is that unlike in PoW systems where more and more cryptocurrency is continually created as rewards for miners, the total amount of cryptocurrency units are usually created at launch in PoS systems.

That’s often the reasoning behind using transaction fees as reward for validators. That being said, in certain cases new currency can be created by inflating the coin supply which can then be used as reward.

Advantages of Proof-Of-Stake

PoS is widely regarded as one of the best options for a cryptocurrency consensus algorithms. Here’s why:

• Energy Efficiency
  PoS algorithms are energy efficient — especially when compared to PoW. Cutting out the energy-intensive mining process makes PoS a greener option.
• Security
  Attackers must put their assets — their stake — on the line in order to attempt a 51% attack. A big deterrent. For comparison, attackers don’t lose their hardware when attempting 51% attacks on PoW systems.
• Decentralisation
  Large mining-pools (groups of miners combining their resources) can control over 51% of networks running PoW systems, leading to a very real threat of centralisation. This comes as a result of the exponential increase in reward per investment on PoW systems, as opposed to the linear increase on PoS systems.
  If a user on a PoS based network investments twice as much as another user, they’ll have twice as much control. The same scenario on PoW would grant the user exponentially more control.

The ‘Nothing at Stake ‘ Problem

For all its plus points, critics of the Proof of Stake system are quick to point out the economic challenge known as the Nothing at Stake problem. It’s an interesting little dilemma that allegedly prevents PoS from being an ideal option for distributed consensus.

The idea here is that in the event of a fork (the blockchain splitting in two), block generators have nothing to lose by supporting different blockchains, essentially preventing the conflict from ever resolving.

In PoW systems this is guarded against since users would have to split their computational resources in order to support both sides of the fork. In PoS systems, however, validators’s stakes would be duplicated onto both chains meaning they could potentially claim twice the amount of rewards.

Simulations have shown that forging on several chains is possible, even profitable, but PoS advocates have demonstrated several work-arounds. Ethereum’s Casper protocol, for instance, is set to require participants to submit a deposit which will be confiscated if they are deemed to have violated a pre-determined set of rules — such as signing off on multiple forks.

Ethereum’s Casper Protocol

Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap, is transitioning from a PoW to a PoS system, codenamed Casper. While we still don’t know the exact details of how and when the transition will take place, we know that it will be a two part process, with the first part including a hybrid PoW/PoS system, before moving on to PoS completely.

The reasoning behind the move makes an interesting read:

“Transitioning the Ethereum network from PoW to PoS has been on the roadmap and in the Yellow Paper since the launch of the protocol. Although effective in coming to a decentralized consensus, PoW consumes an incredible amount of energy, has no economic finality, and has no effective strategy in resisting cartels. Excessive energy consumption, issues with equal access to mining hardware, mining pool centralization, and an emerging market of ASICs each provide a distinct motivation to make the transition as soon as possible.”

It’s important to keep in mind that different cryptocurrencies use different consensus mechanisms (PoW, PoS, DPoS etc.) and it’s just as important to remember that the consensus mechanisms themselves differ from one another. Not all PoS algorithms work the same way, for instance.

Doing your own proper due diligence on a cryptocurrency involves understanding its inner workings. We hope this article helps you do that.