Ok, this will be a more personal post again.
In the past months, I made some mistakes that brought my company (and me) close to bankruptcy. In short, I put all stakes on a risky crowdfunding campaign for CosyAI, which we then postponed for eight weeks and finally stopped after three days.
To make things worse, I took on private loans to pay for myself and our small team, while we dedicated all our work on projects that didn't generate direct income. Of course, there's a little more to the story, but this is the bottom line. At least, I didn't take out loans in the company's name, so we are not officially bankrupt.
Now friends and family members are urging me to take a break from crazy projects and... get a job. Look, they say, obviously you haven't been able to pull off your entrepreneurial ambitions, so better focus on earning a living and repaying your debts.
And, of course, they have a point. They say this because they care for me and they don't want to see me struggling. They have been incredibly supportive in the past. I highly respect their perspectives and critique. And I'm deeply grateful that I've been in a position that allowed me to try things that others would consider crazy.
Nevertheless, I decided to keep going.
So what does that even mean?
In the past weeks, I did my best to reflect and collect feedback so that I don't just end up repeating past mistakes out of stubbornness and self-deception. I'm partly writing this text in hope for more feedback and critical questions - please reach out, if you have any.
The result of these reflections is clear: I will guide myself not less, but more, by what I feel is right. Instead of trying to hop on a more classical "career", I will try even harder to measure everything I do by one single measure: Is it really sincere?
I did go through moments of quite high pressure in the past weeks. And each single time when I realized that I will not give in to these pressures, it filled me with smiling happiness. This isn't about "me versus other peoples' expectations" or about "me versus society's expectations". This is about me continuing to become myself, patiently and smilingly.
My starting point remains what gave the name to this blog:
We have this one life on this one Earth.
I'm simply not willing to live my life along, while watching how we mess up the living conditions on this planet for ourselves, our children, and other species.
And yes, for me that means more crazy projects
No matter how I much I reflect about it, so far it's my conclusion that the best contribution I can make with my particular skill-set and experiences is just that: Starting and leading insanely ambitious projects - and keeping up the energy and happiness even if things feel impossible.
Out of the 10 big projects I tried in the past twenty years, just 1.5 were relatively successful. And none has yet achieved the globally transformative impact that I'm aiming for. But with each project I've been learning, and if necessary I'm going to try 10 times more.
I still believe there are too few people who try to build projects that are ambitious enough and at the same time sincere. Most really ambitious, successful projects we get today are either ego booster machines or driven by speculative greed. Both in my view do more harm than good to everyone involved - for the very reason that they undermine our sincerity.
In fact, I believe sincerity is all we need to save the world
The big, big realization I had in the past year is that a major part of my contribution is taking care of my own healing - with the help of others. Since then, I'm discovering more patterns every week in which I've been in my own way. And I see how such patterns keep being pressed onto all of us.
It's so damn hard to be sincere in our "modern" (or "post-modern") world. There's so much (self-)deceptive storytelling dropped on us every day, reinforced by incentives and pressures that play on our deepest fears and insecurities.
And yet, my experience is that as soon as we actually work on being more sincere, we can unleash a strength and a happiness that can transform anything. My situation is difficult right now, but at the core, I'm happier and more optimistic than I've ever been.
So here my plan
I will continue my focus on turning myself into an "expert" on the safe and cooperative use of artificial intelligence. With Platform21, I'm building up a team to offer safe, customized AI tools to coops, small companies, and NGOs.
At the same time, I will keep pushing with the projects that emerged as the essence of my past activities:
At the core is Cosyland - the non-profit project to help people and organizations on their journey towards cooperating sincerely (this is what cosy stands for ;). To me, Cosyland is also the base for an effective social network that is grounded in real (i.e. offline) and sincere human connections.
I will also continue contributing to building the coalition for CosyAI. I'm more convinced than ever that we need a cooperative framework for managing this powerful technology - and that this technology can actually help us making sincerely cooperative projects more successful.
The next step: Building a team
For me, everything starts with a team. As one core learning, I'm now looking for people who bring complementary skills and are as crazy as I am. By crazy I mean that they're willing to take the risk of exploring new ways of sincere collaboration and value generation, beyond the proven ways of making money in the current system.
After all, I'd rather sit with five brilliant people in a small room working towards real transformation, than with 5000 brilliant people in a chic designer office, working on "innovation" that just ends up serving the status quo.
If you know anyone who might be crazy enough and could bring relevant skills, please reach out at felix@platform21.net.
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