What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that we
have ever come up with. It’s the
equivalent of a bicycle for our minds –Steve Jobs
My professional life orbits technology and selling the latest and greatest of it to my enterprise customers. By riding this technology continuum, I've discovered some tech short-cuts you should quickly implement. My hope is you can use these tips to future-proof yourself for tomorrow and better prepare for technology's Vast Future.
To start, I believe technology in 2015 is at yet another inflection point. It's standing at a deep chasm, looking down and ready to leap, less it get left behind. This inflection point is very similar to the most well known and recent: the advent of the internet. True to its very nature, today's inflection point is also unique, quick flowing, and unchartered. Since I mentioned the Intenet, let us now put that inflection point under a microscope and see how technology's past can help predict its future.
The Internet as we know it today became accessible to the general public in the early 1990’s. Although it took almost a decade to advance to this level, the intenet's evolution now becomes much make rapid.
Those who embraced the Internet early such as Mark Cuban profited handsomely. Now sure... Mark got very lucky and
the wind was strongly at his back, however he was not the only person to catch
this same technology typhoon. Other technology moguls
such as: Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, or Larry Page were
right there with him. Albeit, these moguls
were doing something completely different from Mr. Cuban however, they were still focused on technology, leveraging it, and all were positively affect by the internets's gravitation pull on eqch's technological genius.
So, what does this all mean and why were these Edison's of our time immensely successful? I believe it is because these individuals happened to recognize an inflection point in technology and made the most of it. For those of you who aren't familiar with what an inflection point, let me explain. An inflection
point is a certain point, that once reached turns everything before it on its head. An example is once water starts boiling it will never stop bubbling, it is forever changed so long as it is above 212 F. Water turning to ice is another parallel example.
So in closing, I believe Technology has begun boiling again and is at an inflection point. My advice to you is to leverage this shift, while of course making sure you don’t get burnt. Here are my top 3 tips for making sure you don’t get scalded and come out of this tech boom better than when you went into it.
These tips can be implemented immediately.
- Purchase your .com domain name. This can easily be done through Godaddy and costs between 1$-15$ (I own mine, www.DerekVeenstra.com)
- Claim your LinkedIn URL and make it your name, exactly how it appears on your LinkedIn profile, here is a tutorial. My LinkedIn profile URL is https://www.linkedin.com/in/derekveenstra for example.
- Claim your name with a corresponding Gmail account, if you're not too late. Unfortunately I was outfoxed and had to settle for VeenstraDerek@Gmail.com There are actaully 179,349 Derek's in the US alone. 10 Derek Veenstra's on Facebook last time I searched.