Living in the Future

What does it feel like to hoist yourself into the future, and start living in the future again after having drifted for a while?

I'm having to catch up on cloud deployment as part of a new team I'm on.  Wow, there is a lot of change in the last 5 years.  I feel swamped.

I remember I felt swamped like this a while ago.  And reading about taking crazy risks reminded me of the feeling, and makes me wonder what the risks are of introducing significant change into the group I'm working in.

I guess I could get fired for being too inconsiderate of people who don't like change or the associated risks.

I've also had a long-running idea about making genealogy data editable in a distributed version control way.  Although my ideas are undeveloped, due to my current lack of ability to focus, I've been working on how I could make the idea more viable.

So now that I'm feeling the need to get on the early adopter curve again, I saw How to Get Startup Ideas from Paul Graham, and realized that this article was about both things:

• living in the future
• developing new ideas

From Paul's article:

It takes time to come across situations where you notice something missing. And often these gaps won't seem to be ideas for companies, just things that would be interesting to build. Which is why it's good to have the time and the inclination to build things just because they're interesting.

Live in the future and build what seems interesting. Strange as it sounds, that's the real recipe.

I guess it's the process of shedding the natural loss aversion that I'm not used to, and accepting and realizing the innovation risks that may come.