The DAO, the Psychologist, and the Philosopher

About a DAO I’m building, the endowment effect that slows down manifestation, and the Diderot effect that might make you poor.

1/ I’m Building a DAO

Before we start, this is what a DAO is:

A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is an emerging form of legal structure that has no central governing body and whose members share a common goal to act in the best interest of the entity. Popularized through cryptocurrency enthusiasts and blockchain technology, DAOs are used to make decisions in a bottom-up management approach.

~ Investopedia

I’ve got this vision to connect people who are still working on their life purposes.

I believe in the decentralised economy and distributism, where 

the world's productive assets should be widely owned rather than concentrated.

~ Wikipedia

Based on my mentoring experience, when people share their problems with me, it’s a combination of not knowing what they want and the lack of a supportive world for them to be able to realise their dreams.

For instance, a friend wants to become a product manager, and they (I use a neutral pronoun here because the requests came from my male and female friends, I don’t want to single out, in case it would drive a misunderstanding between us upon reading my newsletter) asked about the qualities of a PM, what books to read or courses to take. I recommended the steps as I don’t withhold any knowledge. But I always start by asking if this is what they really want to achieve. 

It’s my mental reflection upon what I’ve been thinking with my life. I’m a PM, but I’ve got a sense that this is only temporary (hence, the DAO later). I’m called for something different, such as mentoring.

But mentoring without a tangible action is something that I don’t really see myself doing in the future. I need to provide better help – a holistic solution for those in the intersection and still figuring out what the next career step is, or if they even want to jump into solopreneurship.

The calling in my heart told me that someone could create a unique job. A new earth where each of us, an element in the prosperous community, can contribute our best to elevate the collective lives without having to send out countless job applications, sometimes participating in the dehumanising route. 

In the Renaissance era, artists have their patrons. We see websites like Patreon to support creators. This is good, but what about combining the available models and solutions into a more holistic approach to the stuck career, hustle culture, and even poverty, into a DAO that connects those with the resources to people needing resources?

• For those who are still stuck, they may encounter counselling and coaching from the coaches in the DAO

• For those who want to learn about content creation, writing, social media management, the experts can create courses or scholarships affordable to enroll in the courses

• For those starting a business and needing capital, they may have access to capital from over the world with the stablecoins, effectively opening more opportunities

The world is going borderless, and blockchain – a field in which I’m actively involved due to my day job and writing passion – is the solution to connecting different dots and creating markets from different situations. 

I believe it’s not somebody’s fault for being born in a certain geographical area in the world. Besides, many countries’ borders were defined during the colonialization era or way back further, involving wars and conquering. Aspects of cultures that influence our minds can be readily mingled with different, beneficial thoughts or ideas from across the world, thanks to the internet. But the payment system is still siloed, and late-stage capitalism has claimed victims in those losing their jobs.

I wrote it all a series of 8-week articles published weekly.

If you’re interested in joining the discussion, to contributing as another voice to make headway in this social endeavour, join this Discord channel.

I’m also still figuring out how to run a DAO, about governance and economic systems, but learning together and fusing a solution is always better than thinking alone.

Besides, the findings from Harvard Business Review say that a sense of community is the ultimate key to happiness. You might eat well, exercise regularly, and be a control freak on your sleeping hygiene, but without the sense of community, you’re prone to loneliness kicking in.

That’s the purpose of building this DAO, a community of starting entrepreneurs and those who are still finding their higher callings.

In the long history of humankind . . . those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.

~ Charles Darwin

Fun fact: the name Berdaya DAO:

Berdaya means “empowered” in my native tongue, Indonesian.

And that’s what I want to achieve, to empower people.

2/ About manifestation and the endowment effect

[edited note for grammar, tenses, and unnecessary parts because it was written almost a year ago when I was job-searching]

Delay in the manifestation is not preferred.

It’s always said in many manifesting techniques, in posts and stories, that there could be a delay, but there could be an instant granting. Countless materials speak about the timeline in 3D or the Divine Timing.

What can we learn from it?

If we live intentionally, we know that everything that has happened serves a purpose. 

A lesson. A reminder.

There’s no point in letting panic or anxiety govern our lives.

Our mind is an unruly horse that we should master, not the other way around.

If we decide based on fear, which stems from a scarcity mindset, what we will see is this world is a crazy, cruel place.

A zero-sum game.

It means that competition is everything in this world, and we should win in every aspect.

We live on the “shoulds” and “musts”, rather than “get to”.

But if we decide based on faith, which stems from an abundance mindset, every day we wake up to is another school day, to absorb and learn the lesson of life.

A lesson to pick and internalise.

I admit I’ve lived based on this scarcity alone for the second half of my education in Edinburgh last year.

The thing is, I knew, I deeply knew in my heart, that an abundance mindset should flourish in my life and I shouldn’t listen to the scarcity and fear.

(Notice the shoulds?)

But knowing isn’t enough, I must apply it. Applying is the most difficult one.

And the nature of the thing I was manifesting, which was a job itself, sometimes presented itself in the competition mode:

a job interview where I should come out as the best out of many candidates, essentially elbowing them left, right, and centre.

I’ve learned and internalised, made mistakes and regressed, but what I learned from this competition mode was it tired me out.

Deciding based on fear scattered my focus. For instance, after so many rejections and also the failure in the final step of the interview, fear fuelled me to be so scared that I’d miss out on opportunities in life, so I doubled down my worry and efforts. I sent an application for any job recommendation (still in product management, but with random fields) on my LinkedIn page.

It wasn’t until I took time to reflect, a few days after, that hey, this might be a wrong strategy!

I don’t like the recruitment process at a few companies that gave me a ghosted feeling. The HR recruiter didn’t contact me in a decent amount of time if I couldn’t make it to the next stage. When I was a user interviewer (as in I interviewed product managers for our team, before passing the candidates on to the final stage: my boss), our company used the max of 1 working day system for the interviewers to say Yes/No.

And I assumed it was also the case in the companies I interviewed with. So, if my interview was on Wednesday two weeks ago, why had it taken one week and a half for the recruiter to get back to me with the result?

I added a new clause in the manifesting script that I didn’t want to be ghosted by recruiters. I was not wasting time here.

Logically, from various job search process experiences, I should know what I liked and didn’t like by now, right? Especially since I had been in the process since November 2022, albeit on and off for a few days.

This knowledge should arm me to apply for the companies or fields that interest me, shouldn’t it? Instead of me sending flamethrower bullets (if they exist, I don’t know, you get my point), if anything, I should be with my sniper rifle at this point.

I had a limited amount of time and energy. I remember my boss, whom I consider one of the best mentors in life, told me: you’ve got a finite resource, Sekar. Your time and energy is limited.

Which makes sense. Despite the abundance, the energy is still within physical constraints. My focus and goal were also manifesting in physical constraints, for example, the 24-hour window that keeps everything nice and chaotic inside. My body also operates on a biological clock which I must keep healthy to support me for the days to come. So, I must be smart with my resources.

I’m resourceful, but I must be smart.

Therefore, I was being frantic with various rejections and shooting in the dark in fear just to hit the target.

Do you think this is the most logical strategy to follow? Of course, not.

Instead, I changed my strategy to be sharper and more intuitive. Now that my resource had to be utilised smartly, instead of vomiting random bullets in the hope that one would hit the bullseye, I was more precise in my approach.

No company ever would win from this random strategy to hit their target. If anything, working in the corporate world taught me to be more strategic with my approach when the stakes are higher and the deadline is nearer.

Cut down the waste — Kanban strategy — the aimless efforts.

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(addition on 14-Feb-2024) I remember reading in the book Mind Over Money by Claudia Hammond that poverty reduces one’s cognitive ability at the prefrontal cortex of the brain, where the poorer research participants of a social experiment refuse to receive a bigger sum of money in a week but choose a smaller amount, now. In other similar research, the finding is echoed. With the Princeton students as the subjects, for example, clearly they were not of poverty, but their scarcity mindset in the engineered Family Feud-like quiz made them make poor choices in utilising their resources.

So, that’s that. When I was job-searching, I was in a scarcity mindset. Hence, the strategy.

This also aligns with my learning much later in life, very recently, about essentialism. To embrace the spirit of slow living, it’s non-negotiable to strip down all unnecessary commitments, preventing ourselves from committing too fast in the first place.

(end of addition)

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Aimless effort in my process that I can recognise is sending random applications to any companies recommended by LinkedIn.

Quality, not quantity. 

Suppose a salesperson is tasked with a target and a deadline. In that case, they might want to be specific with the high probability of lead, or their previous acquaintances, instead of fitting 1000x possible leads.

Besides, randomly sending applications might water down your passion, and I know it from my cover letter, for example.

That my story isn’t good enough.

Also, the worst thing about fitting the quantity of random applications is that it gives me a false sense of safety!

In my tracker, I recorded all the applications I had done in the hope that one of those almost two hundred applications would be fruitful.

The strange thing is, it might have worked in my previous stages of life, but I knew deep down it was different this time.

Why? Because I had evolved in my spiritual journey, I was not the same person I was many years ago after I got laid off. My skills and path in product management had equipped me with new strengths that somehow I felt were not suited for this kind of strategy anymore.

If I, a lead product manager, in my previous role, couldn’t just say this to the Director: OK we’ll just ship whatever the features in the roadmap, as many as possible, hoping that one of them will fit the user’s use case, under what circumstances could I be this reckless in my personal strategy that is 10x more important for my present and future, more personal to me?

Having many features in the roadmap gives me a false sense of safety because I thought oh look at this, many to pick from, one of them will be my best feature.

No. Nope. Nope. That’s not how it works. 

[end of note]

That was it, my reflection I wrote when I was still on my job-hunting journey. 

As shown in my other post below, it ended up gracefully without me having to send any job applications. I’m still in that job today, waking up early and finishing work early, to carry on my day with my passion in writing and starting my coaching business.

I deleted the word “should” a lot from the original note.

Two key lessons from my journey back then, that I realised recently:

1- Responding from the abundance mindset, instead of from the scarcity mindset

Instead of forcing things to happen, applying the strategy of my Human Design (Generator) might seem more fruitful. The strategy is to respond. Now, upon reflection, what I did to finally land this job was to respond to the invitation and questions from a headhunter, and the rest was history. Instead of chasing and rushing, and getting disappointed as things didn’t happen my way, the flow that worked for me was by responding. I’m still not sure, however, to consistently apply the strategy to other fields, such as the business that I’m building now. But, let’s see. If I receive other lessons from this walk of entrepreneurship life, I’ll surely write them down for the coming posts.

Disclaimer: I don’t quite believe the Human Design, MBTI, and other personality classification techniques. I always take them with a grain of salt. In my Human Design, for instance, despite being a Generator, I also relate to the strategy of Mani-Gen and Manifestor. How I apply it to myself is like this: whenever I feel lacking application, that’s when I apply the strategy. For example, from my job-searching endeavour above, I was in the Manifesting mode but less in the receptive/responding mode.

I believe other situations might present themselves later in my life where responding isn’t enough, or I need to switch gears to be in Manifesting mode again so that other strategies are to be deployed.

2- The endowment effect

This is observed in the behavioural finance field, the field that brought Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking Fast and Slow, and Noise, to become a Nobel Prize recipient for the Economic Sciences in 2002.

The endowment effect is a phenomenon where people price their possessions higher than what the market (or independent outsiders) tags. The psychological reason also makes people more reluctant to part ways with their possessions, regardless of the price. This has been studied, and it drills down to the loss aversion.

Humans are naturally loss averse. In prehistoric times, had Homo sapiens’ brains not been on the constant vigilance to scan for the next threats, I wouldn’t have been here writing this paragraph and you wouldn’t have been reading this. Our ancestors kept the food stock carefully because the loss of food, say, due to weather or thieves, would mean famine, wiping out entire families. The scarcity mindset was justified because of the harsh living situations. Therefore, the loss aversion made sense. This evolutionary hang-up stays with us, making it more difficult to trade our possessions.

In my case, it’s the strategy that I knew worked. Deep down, it was even the scarcity mindset that I needed to perform a certain way to maximise the chance of landing an interview. 

But the most important thing about the endowment effect is it prevents us from truly letting go, to detach from the outcome.

We must give space to what might come as the result of our manifestation. How could you allow new things that are meant for you to arrive in your life if you aren’t brave enough to let some things go from it? 

The endowment effect tricks our mind into holding tightly onto our possessions, not just material, but also memories, habits, expectations, or relationships . . .  narrowing our horizon so we’re constantly living in our heads, not being open to possibilities outside.

The universe works in abundance. What I did was just wasting my energy resources. But I didn’t know, and I learned.

I shared this on my Instagram reel here:

thegentleroadmap

A post shared by @thegentleroadmap

Fun fact: the loss aversion and the scarcity mindset are the root causes of anxiety symptoms. For me to live a meaningful life without the debilitating fear of physical manifestations of anxiety, I try to always evaluate my flare-ups against the abundance mindset.

3/ About the Diderot effect and excessive wants, blocking the manifestation

Okay, this is interesting. In short, ELI5 (Explain Like I’m 5 y.o.), the Diderot effect is the spiralling effect when one wants a thing, making them continuously want more in the surrounding of that initial item.

For example, you want to buy a bunch of flowers to spice up your bedroom (hey, spring is coming!). But you need a vase, so you go to a charity shop to buy a vase. Then, you go to your favourite grocer to buy the flowers. 

But a vase containing a bunch of daffodils seems empty, you think, after arranging it on your windowsill. You need a little trinket to make the space warmer and cosier. A tealight, perhaps? One tealight isn’t enough, you think. Hm, what about something better to decorate that nook, so it can be repurposed as your reading corner? 

Your windowsill soon looks inadequate, subpar to the vision your idea spurs on your mind has blessed you with. Soon, you need to buy a throw blanket, or maybe with additional couple of cushions, so you can nap on the sofa nearby, dozing off with the book over your chest as you feel sleepy after reading in that corner, with the natural sunlight coming through the window.

Idyllic, as it may sound, and that’s how minimalism is often touted for the privileged few because it can mean a complete overhauling of your old interior design and replacing your 1970s furniture with Japandi sleek and modern stools and kitchen countertop.

Stepping aside from the rabbit hole of talking about consumerism (which can take form in another long essay), the Diderot effect makes your brain want more. Instead of focusing on one or two things to manifest by praying and taking inspired actions, you start adding more bullet points to the list. In the spirit of essentialism and slow living, you’d never get anywhere to your dream if you’re constantly chasing the next item that you think might go along with the initial wish.

Besides, notice the word I use: “to chase”. Not attracting, but chasing, because your mind has been tricked that certain embellishments become must-haves, instead of nice-to-haves.

Have you ever experienced similar things, wanting more and more, as every wish or every possession opens up a new step in the staircase to never-ending goalposts?

Share in the comments below if you wish.

Until next time,