I often think about what it takes to succeed at something.

I know we have a world full of experts who would no doubt be able to come up with all sorts of different formulaic answers for "what makes a success". While they may be correct, I think they often overlook what is perhaps the most significant thing, and that is relevance.

The thing is, it doesn't matter how great and groundbreaking a new idea might be, if it's not actually relevant to people in their lives and what they need in their lives... it's likely not going to get very far. While we might declare things cool and initially get involved in them for their novelty value, that won't last long if they aren't relevant to our world.

This is often true in the world of technology, blockchain, and crypto.

Somebody comes up with something that they claim to be a "groundbreaking and game changing new idea" or a new way of doing things... but it quickly turns out that while the aforesaid statements might be true, nobody actually cares.

I've personally experienced this quite a lot in the field of de-fi, where it so often seems like the groundbreaking new ideas smell more like "a solution in search of a problem" than something people would actually use.

I've seen quite a few proposals along the way that were announced with great fanfare and I ended up thinking to myself "this may be fabulous, but the only people who care are the 17 people who sat in on the original planning meeting", and the great success your promising is predicated on hundreds of thousands of users.

I'm not sure if this is some sort of weird myopia, or a total cluelessness with respect to understanding what the marketplace actually wants.

In a very distant past when I worked in the it industry, one of the things we often encountered was the fact that so many developers were completely removed from reality.

Working with usability and human factors, I often spend time as a kind of go between and liaison between developers, the marketing department, and management. And I have to say that the perceptions of each different vastly even though people purportedly were working towards the same end.

I sometimes even see a variation of this unfold here on Hive. It comes up both in DHF proposals, as well as in things that have already been developed.

It is as if the new ideas exist completely independently of any kind of feasibility study or even minimal research to determine whether people actually want what's being offered.

Having spent a fair amount of time in the marketing field, as well, I can assure you that it is much easier to build something to a demand that already exists then it is to bring something completely new to market that people don't even know what's about nor how it will benefit them.

And being too myopic about what you're doing is almost a guaranteed path to failure.

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