What Do I Want to Do?
A Radically Ambitious Business Concept
As a part of the Black Technology Mentorship Program (BTMP), Christopher Lafayette challenged me to ‘put pen to paper’ with the following prompt:
If someone (Bill Gates, Elon Musk, etc) wanted to give me funding for absolutely anything I wanted to do today, for a project that I would work on everyday for the next 2–5 years (and likely long after that). What would I say?
What do I truly want to work on in the short term? No worrying about money or practicality. No self limiting beliefs. What do I want?
After several inspired nights, recording part of my ideation, a surprising amount of research, and some peer reviews later, this is what I wrote.
I want to create a personalized ecosystem for self-fulfillment.
It can be a suite of tools, platform, or service that shows people exactly what they can do to live their best life.
I want to concentrate the full power of the internet, technology, and humanity towards directly improving individual lives.
Why this? (The Problem)
What does it mean to be unfulfilled?
It means not having one’s needs met.
This is a pervasive feeling that not only applies to humans, but any living creature or idea. It is a high ceiling of potential problems to solve like Google’s “organize the world’s information” and Amazon’s customer service obsession.
There will always be important issues to solve if you focus on the unmet needs of people (or systems).
Though it has a vague and large scale, it has a very clear goal: to satisfy, to complete, to finish, to fulfill.
You know when something is fulfilled. But you also know that this is a temporary state, that we will always find a new finish line.
Unfulfillment is at the core of any and every pain point.
This is an obvious statement, and yet… , there is no singular organization focused on simply making the lives of every individual better, on a consistent and sustainable basis. Sure we have products for specific needs, but not a product or service dedicated to helping you get the most out of your life, whatever that means for you.
Self-fulfillment: the act or fact of fulfilling one’s ambitions, desires, etc., through one’s own efforts.
~ Dictionary.com
We need a better way to make use of the full power of the internet to grant each and every individual the ability to fulfill their own ambitions, desires, etc through their own efforts.
A multifaceted problem
Human society has an especially egregious problem of being blind to anything we cannot see (and believe). There are a number of cognitive biases to explain this, but the result can be plainly seen in things like how the US is responding to the COVID 19 pandemic, and how the world is responding to climate change.
But this is a problem even on much smaller scales.
I am super interested in making the most of the internet, do you know who Douglas Engelbert is? Maybe, maybe not. But even if you’ve seen the Mother of All Demos, do you know what his actual intent was for the internet? Probably not. (Here’s a short write up on that).
I am Haitian American. But I can’t speak Creole or French. I have been ‘americanized’. I didn’t even know the full story of Toussaint L’ouverture until I thought to read it last year. I had no idea that my great great grandfather was a master craftsman, and actually made the table my great aunt threw away a few years ago. I only happened to find that out after wondering why my little brother loves carving so much and my mother remembered an old story about the Mainland.
These are just some small but significant personal examples of how knowledge is so often lost, forgotten, or ignored in today’s society. Even with the amazing amounts of information we can gather and store, most of us are missing out on knowledge, experiences, or resources that could drastically change our life, or at least provide a better sense of belonging.
What does it matter if knowledge is being lost, if the knowledge that hasn’t been lost is being ignored?
~ Alan Kay
This is part of the problem I want to solve.
Another part is the fact that many people find themselves distracted, unmotivated, uninspired, and often lost due to this over consumerized world.
To reiterate:
Humans ignore what we cannot see and cannot see what we do not believe.
Self-limiting beliefs
Most people don’t have a sense of belonging, of history, of significance. They think they are starting from zero despite possibly having a rich family history or a resourceful community.
Most people don’t know how to find or make use of what resources and information they do have access to. A lot of information today is consumed irrespective of culture. Nuance and context is often stripped away in favor of being fast, general, or trendy.
Most people can’t easily grasp large scale issues like climate change, racism, and even pandemics. Problems that are not visible in their daily lives are hard to prioritize, especially when they are trying to figure out how to survive or maintain their lifestyle.
Even when people are able to digest these big problems, they often feel like they have no real way of making a difference. They feel powerless.
People are often not presented with real solutions. They are presented with problems. Most people just see problems in their lives: paying bills, health issues, raising their kids, lack of friends, etc. Thus they are more likely to believe that these are the limitations of their lives.
And of course, the solutions people are presented with are consumer products: buy this, go to school, get a job, etc. These only serve to confirm that limitation. They tell us that we need some external good or service to fix our life.
Luckily there are more products coming out like Calm and Brilliant that help people to improve themselves.
But what if we could solve all of these self-limiting beliefs by presenting to people a personalized system that is designed to break them out of these constraints? What if we could present to people a system that showed them their own rich history, high quality information, and actionable steps in an easily digestible format in order to inspire a feeling of self empowerment?
The Vision
What if I could show you the absolute best research of the last few decades about your specific problem (like how to learn more effectively, or how to find good music, or how to rediscover your heritage, or just how to make more money)?
What if I could put in your hands an easy to digest manual on how to live the most enjoyable life possible? In that manual would be everything from exercises you can do based on your specific genetics and brain structure, culturally significant practices your ancestors did that will likely resonate with you, a perfectly crafted environment for your desired lifestyle, a set of steps that is crafted to challenge you exactly as much as you can take, etc.
It would show very clearly what your strengths and growth areas are. What are likely highly compatible activities or just how to work on yourself and feel a sense of progress.
Every single component of that manual would be created by a dedicated team of people who gathered all of humanity’s best knowledge, resources, and abilities just to help you have a great life. And right alongside that manual is a personal assistant, life coach, or friend that will dedicate their life to helping you learn and apply that information.
What if we could do that?
What if we could give this to your mother? Your children? Your neighbors? Your country?
What if you could use a manual like this to constantly find music that makes you feel alive? Or to find books that feed your mind? Or to know where you came from in the African Diaspora and what your ancestors did in their day to day lives?
What if we could create a document just like this for solving big problems like climate change; where all of humanity’s stored knowledge, resources, and technology is focused on solving that problem…?
That is the vision.
I want to unleash the full potential of humanity, and focus it towards individual people and problems.
I want to create systems that concentrate the power of technology and people on individual lives and issues.
What does this look like?
Say you want to build better habits. Turns out, there is already a ton of research and great books on how to do that. But which ones should you read first? Which methods to apply? And how exactly do you apply them to your life in respect to your specific needs and struggles?
To paraphrase Jason Calacanis, you can’t solve complex problems with a shotgun (usually), you need surgical precision.
Here’s how:
- We research your life. We look at whatever data we can get about you. Your current habits, lifestyle, background, environment, the people around you, and maybe even your genetics and brain imaging (though these can come in later iterations based on the success/failure of the first plan).
- We analyze those trends highlighted by the data, and cross reference it with the current data out there now. We look at books like Atomic Habits and Flow. We find all the best research in psychology, neuroscience, and even anthropology to get an idea of your cultural context.
- With this solid foundation, we begin to ideate some ideas as to how to best apply the knowledge of the world (from step 2) to your specific life (from step 1). We think creatively and exhaustively, and then we pair it down to what is practical for your current situation.
- We then test these ideas with you. Either through a simulation or just working with you to see which ideas stick. All the while gathering more data on what worked or didn’t work and why.
- After we find something that seems to really hold. Something that you can apply even in your tough days, we measure the impact it has on your life. We look to see how much it changes your life in the short term as well as in the long term. If at any time the impact begins to wane, we iterate on the process.
- Finally, once you are truly satisfied, we ask that you pay it forward. This can be a small percentage of any gains that you have made thanks to this improving your life. It could be monetary, it could be your services, or any other resources you deem appropriate.
This is just the first iteration of what the process might be like. But it is based on User Centered Design, a tried and true method of making human-focused solutions.
The learnings from each of these steps can and will be centralized in a database of sorts to make it easier to help the next person. So after the first few times, we would have a number of patterns that have been proven to work and only need to be customized for individuals.
Furthermore, each of these solutions can themselves be put into an easy to access public database that other people can use on their own to improve their lives. Everyone who downloads solutions from this database also gets some kind of tool to help customize the solution to their specific needs as well.
This process can be done in a matter of days, or maybe even hours, up to a few months, and loosely capped at a year (to ensure we are action-biased). The extent of each step will be determined by the time and resources available. But whenever new resources or more time is available, we can reassess and update past solutions.
This will start as a largely manual service, but will be steadily and cautiously built into an automated system.
Organization Levels
Level 1 — A research action lab for getting down to the ‘first principles’ of what is stopping individuals and businesses from living a meaningful life
Level 2 — A consulting agency creating high quality solutions for people and organizations to improve their life
Level 3 — A platform connecting research-backed solutions in a living, breathing world where anyone can easily find the resources they need for their specific life problem along with the data behind it
Level 4 — An AI helping each and every individual find and get access to the exact resources they need to improve their life through a game-like set of action steps
Level 5 — An autonomous system that can guide individuals, organizations, and entire civilizations on how to become more efficient, advanced, and self-fulfilling
Design Principles
Self Empowerment — Always prioritize solutions and methods that enable the individual to make actionable steps towards improving their life. Don’t make decisions for them, allow them to make their own informed decisions.
Data Transparency — Keep It Super Simple. Make it as clear and simple as possible to see exactly what data is being used, why, and where it is going.
Measurable Impact — Success is a measure of quality. Worry less about engagement and more about the meaningful effect this has had on every individual’s life.
Sufficiently Approachable Magic — The unknown gets burned at the stake. (~Michael Robbins) Create delight by building a bridge to the unfamiliar with familiarity.
Aligned Incentives — Profit must come from the success of our customers, never at their expense. Everyone and everything that interacts directly or indirectly with our product is the customer. Success is measured qualitatively, not just by the numbers.
Egoistic Altruism — Individuals can only thrive if the ecosystem thrives. One’s self-fulfilment should not come at the expense of another. This is a positive sum game where everyone wins.
Examples
Here are just a few quick and dirty examples of the many, many ways this tool can be used to bring together all of humanity’s knowledge and resources to help improve one’s quality of life.
- “I am feeling lonely” ⇒ An AI buddy that can act as a listening ear or can link you to people you will likely enjoy talking to
- “I need to make money” ⇒ A directory of job opportunities curated towards your specific skills along with the networking steps to make to get hired
- “Why do we have taxes?” ⇒ An AR display that shows where your tax dollars are going… and some alternative, voluntary ‘tax’ systems that have been experimentally shown to be more effective to accomplish the same result
- “Am I racist?” ⇒ A VR experience that puts you in the body of different people and/or shows brain scans and micro facial expressions showing how you react to different people, then gives exercises to be more empathetic
- “How to become a space-faring civilization” ⇒ A set of possible steps to take based on leading research and science on how to gather enough resources, build the necessary technology, and problems to avoid when building space cities plus high-tier content to get people inspired and motivated to join the cause
Getting into the details (Gameplay mechanics)
There is a game that recently came out just a few weeks ago as of February 2021 called Valheim. It’s an open world survival game set in the Viking age. It’s still in early access, meaning it’s not completely finished or polished. It’s also a survival game, a genre that had seen disappointment after disappointment for nearly a decade straight. It has had no advertising. It is an indie game with just 5 people on the team. Yet it has become the most popular PC game 2 weeks after launch. It now has over 3 million players in 3 weeks, and is one of the highest rated games with 500K concurrent players on Steam.
Why? Because the gameplay is a perfect formula of progression, exploration, and meaningful work. The game shows you exactly what the end goal is at the very beginning, to defeat 5 big bosses. It shows you where to find the first boss, and from there it’s up to you.
As you explore the lands, you gain skills for everything from jumping and running to blocking and shooting arrows to harvesting and more. You are introduced to a guide that pops up whenever you discover a new thing, and gives a short tutorial on how to use it. Each new tier of progression unlocks more activities, possibilities, and abilities that you didn’t even know you could do before.
This is a master class on what it means to live a self-fulfilling life.
Game loops
Just like how great games work, this self-fulfillment tool can set an overarching goal, then break that down into smaller goals, and make it clear how to accomplish each one, all while refraining from ‘hand holding’ people. This ensures they feel (and truly are) in charge of their experience.
Every individual has a unique experience, but shares the overarching goal of having a fulfilling life. This makes it easy to share and be inspired by each other’s stories.
It’s important to note that this system provides a clear idea of what you can do, not what you should do. It’s not about optimizing life, because that in and of itself is not necessarily fulfilling. It’s more about making it easy to get the most out of one’s life.
Once again, the approach to the entire business largely reflects the User Centered Design process, a tried and true method to deliver meaningful solutions:
- Find someone who has a problem (related to feeling unfulfilled)
- Research the context to see why they have that problem
- Ideate some potential solutions
- Test those solutions
- Apply the most accessible solution
- Measure the impact
- Profit… Sustainably
Iterating throughout.
Detailing the levels of organization
At level 1, the business will function like a research lab. But the research will be indexed and content will be made around that research as it is happening (wherever appropriate). This starts the culture of transparency, while also creating organic marketing and a knowledge database.
At level 2, the team uses that research or methods to provide consultancy services for individuals and businesses alike. Every solution applied is documented, indexed, and modularized so that it can be applied to future situations.
At level 3, these lessons are recorded into a database that anyone can access. The data within can be presented in an easily digestible format, is regularly updated, and always contextualized. People can even get assistance navigating the database to ensure they can use it effectively.
At level 4, this database serves as the foundation for an automated system that can proactively match people with the right data and personalize or curate the information for them. It will be built on the principle of providing ‘superpowers’ rather than handholding and babying.
At level 5, the system will be able to process entire ecosystems so that it can ensure individual lives do not come at the expense of the environment, the society, or other individuals. Subsequently, it will be able to explain the best way to inspire, motivate, and support the sustainable growth of any community no matter the size, from small groups to entire civilizations. (It’s important to note that this may not be an AI, it could be a process that anybody can do, or a simulation, or an analysis tool, or whatever the aggregate research and designs uncover.)
Why this? (My personal interests)
I love working on a number of things ‘at the same time’. I get bored if I have to work on just one project for an extended period of time, even if it is something I am really interested in. I like to dive into multiple subject areas and cross pollinate those ideas (gaming, XR, quantum mechanics, panpsychism, history, architecture, ecology, space exploration, etc). Thus any singular project is bound to lose my interest.
This concept will allow me to focus on one overarching ‘project’ while still exploring a multitude of subject areas, mediums, and methods.
The world is on a knife’s edge
I find it extremely untenable to work on something that is not quickly making a large impact on people’s lives. Especially in today’s accelerated times when we have technology disrupting every industry, at the same time as we have climate and other issues that could end humanity as we know it at virtually any time. I get restless when I am working on something that is not directly improving someone’s life; that is not mapping to visibly making the world a better place.
I want to scale this restlessness to push myself to truly make a positive difference in the lives of my family, my community, my ecosystem, and beyond… as well as myself.
And to be honest… I really want to live in the future already. I want flying cars and space travel and full dive VR games and programmable matter and so on… and I don’t want to wait until I am 80 to experience them, nor do I want their invention to come at the cost of the environment or socioeconomic divides. I want to live in ‘the best possible timeline’ for humanity, in my lifetime. I want my future kids to deal with new problems like exploring space or building new realities or making sentient animals, rather than the same ones we’ve been struggling with for centuries like climate change, poverty, and racism.
It’s personal
This is a very long and deep problem for me. I’ve lived my entire life just trying to figure out how to live up to my own high expectations. I’ve had ambitions to change the world via flying cars, smart super cities, and space habitats for as long as I can remember. But time and again I found myself stuck just trying to get started.
Even for small ambitions like gaining muscle mass or creating habits or helping my family eat healthy, I found myself struggling to make any sort of progress. It felt like no matter how much research I did, I would find things that just didn’t quite work for me. But then someone else would come along and recommend me something that I somehow never heard of and it would help!
I’ve known for a long time that people make some of the best curators. That many people hold amazing knowledge but much of that is often lost, ignored, or never has a chance to be applied and passed on.
I find it absolutely ridiculous that we still don’t have an easy way of learning about our ancestors or heritage as a civilization. I think it’s utterly a waste of potential that we constantly have to rediscover knowledge that people before us or even people alive right now have already discovered.
Living up to my fullest potential
Perhaps it is just FOMO, but I find it absurd that with all the content and data out there now, we could still live our entire lives without ever coming across content that could very well be the best things for us. There could be a video on YouTube right now that could change my life forever. Or a person on LinkedIn that is looking to work with someone exactly like me. Or an MIT course that could teach me the exact skills I need in the way that works for me, etc… But I am missing out simply because the internet is more a giant waterfall where billions of stuff just gets dumped and ran downstream never to be seen, rather than a truly personalized and curated experience allowing us to supercharge our lives.
This problem is even more of an issue when it comes to things that have not been digitized: family history, the microbiology of individuals, the flow of money (beyond GDP and stocks), and so on.
I have some ideas as to what will make my life more fulfilling, and likely many others too: a way to visualize my health (genetics, neurology, microbiology, etc), an easier way to make friends, healthy forms of escapism or non-addictive entertainment, the ability to create things from my imagination, financial stability, etc. This idea will help me to research, test, execute, and scale these ideas and so much more…
Why this? (Market needs)
I believe this business can bring large scale value in the first year or two. Places like the Doughnut Economics Action Lab and Civic Signals show that this level of high tier, actionable research is extremely impactful to businesses and everyday people alike. However, these tend to focus more on the concepts rather than on products.
There is historical evidence for this approach as well. The Bell Research labs and Xerox PARC have created the bulk of innovations in the last century. Alan Kay himself showed that the most impactful technologies and discoveries came out of the first 5 years of ARPA/PARC.
Before that was Menlo Park with Edison and Tesla. But you could also include NASA and the Manhattan project as instances of the potential for a massive concentration of intent and resources. There are ample examples of research labs being the center of worldwide innovation.
Today, we have Google X and MITmedia labs, Santa Fe, IBM, etc, but much of these ‘R&D’ labs are armchair philosophy think tanks, academic theoretical studies, or very conservative innovation labs. Many companies outsource their research to companies like RCA or ThoughtWorks or Deloitte, whose focus is not on delivering world changing positive disruption for the good of mankind, but on delivering marketing material to the client or solutions that, even if truly innovative, are largely privatized.
We need more and bigger research labs that are focused on treating the world as it’s client.
We need labs that want to push the envelope as far as can be, but also able to deliver solutions to organizations and the general public quickly and sustainably.
Just like with Bell Labs and MIT and Xerox PARC, this will attract people from all disciplines to want to work here, even if only for a moment.
The Dream Team
I believe this can be started by just me systemizing the crazy amount of resources, studies, and network I have already started collecting. I can start researching, documenting, suggesting, and measuring solutions.
To speed this up, I think I will need researchers, designers, engineers, life coaches, content creators, and psychologists (some of these roles can be combined depending on the talent). I have ideas as to who I can ask for each of these, but most of them are happily employed or even have their own business, so I would have to perhaps be able to replace their current salaries or be flexible with their involvement.
To specify, a good starting team will likely need to fulfill the following roles:
Ethnographic Research
- Delving into the lives and minds of people to discover their behavioural patterns and qualitative experiences.
Secondary Research
- Finding and aggregating the best resources (scientific studies, books, insights, people, and other content) around issues found in ethnographic research.
User Experience Design
- Crafting unique, personalized yet modular solutions based on user research, and developing highly interactive prototypes that can be rigorously tested.
Usability Testing
- Performing in-depth examinations of the usability and application of design concepts in realistic conditions to ensure the true viability of each solution.
Full-Stack Development
- Building out dynamic products or services based on design specifications that can be used on any platform and in non-ideal conditions.
Backend Engineering
- Developing a graph database that can store all research, testing, and execution results in a highly interactive, moddable, and human-readable format.
Project Management
- Keeping the team on track and on budget without hampering creativity and autonomy.
Life Coaching
- Supporting individuals throughout, and especially after the process to ensure they develop the skills to make the most of their solution.
Psycho-social Analysis
- Understanding the psychological, sociological, and perhaps even anthropological context of each individual.
Content Creation
- Performing organic marketing campaigns via easily digestible and highly engaging articles, videos, podcasts, etc that inform, educate, and/or engage people about our work.
Further details and roles will be added as actual projects are executed.
Transparency
A key aspect of the business will be radical transparency. Where people will be able to see how every decision is made; all the research, data, stakeholders, finances, algorithms, legal considerations, and so on will be clearly and simply displayed.
Every individual can see why the system suggested certain action steps to them and open up a dialogue to decline or even suggest new action or data.
People must have agency over the system.
Of course, we will protect people’s identity or IP if the data shows that complete transparency will decrease their quality of life. We are pro transparency, not anti privacy.
Figuring out how to display all of these details will itself become a powerful feature that will be used for many solutions and products.
For instance, I want to be able to lock any donations or investments gathered behind smart contracts and have a visual blockchain that shows people exactly how we make our money and how every coin is spent.
This level of transparency is crucial to instill trust in the business.
Making Money
The business model will of course be discovered as we go, but here are my initial ideas:
- Impact-based Profit — We make money by charging X percent of the profits the customer makes applying that solution. The percentage is determined by the measured impact. This can manifest as a kind of Income Share Agreement for consumers and revenue share for businesses.
- Crowdsourcing — Alternatively, we ask for money (from investors, donors, or the general public) only after having people submit their problems. We create a plan showing how much money is likely needed to solve each problem. We then use only what we have allocated, the extra is paid out as profit after we have solved their problem.
- Bounty System — We might even be able to have communities or individuals put up money to solve problems for themselves or on behalf of other communities. They can choose if they want to pay out a certain percentage of the bounty upfront if funds are needed immediately.
- Patreon Model — People can choose to support the business by paying monthly or per project. They can choose which tier of service they want. Most of the solutions will be available for free after a time, while supporters can receive extra attention.
Why this? (Conclusion)
In short, I want to create a way to qualitatively improve the lives of every individual creature by harnessing the full potential of human ingenuity and knowledge.
I think we have an incredible amount of information and content, but very little focus with how we use it.
“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.”
~ Edward O. Nilson
It’s high time we become more self-aware of those emotions, update our institutions, and use our technology more responsibly.
To recap this idea very succinctly (thanks to my wonderful SO):
