What We Value

      Have you ever tried to explain something you 'know,' only to realize what you 'know' is just a feeling, not knowledge? How frustrating! Last week, I was trying to explain Patreon, a website that allows creators to get paid for their work. It's a great concept to help bloggers, YouTube creators, and artists of all stripes get funded so they can keep creating the content we love. Each month I pay for webcomics, writers,  and podcasters works that I access for free on the internet and through the library. It feels powerful to help them create what I love.
     So there I was, trying to persuade my friends of the importance of free information, and that people will pay for it if you set things up properly.  I was (trying to) explain my new Patreon account. I set up the account because I love to make things. How fortunate to be born in an era where there are so many free venues to show my creations! One of my YouTube videos has over 800,000 views and weekly I get questions through the comments section and through email. Wouldn't it be great to get paid for it?

      Over the last several years I've gone from making loads of blog posts, to YouTube videos, to Facebook, and just recently to doing all at once. It felt like the right thing. It was interesting and difficult, but I wasn't really sure why I was working so hard at it all.
    I had a major lightbulb moment last night thanks to the Thomas Friedman book, Thank You for Being Late. His description of our changing economy puts so many things in perspective. He talks about the change of power of information to power of flow. In the first chapter Friedman quotes John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison's article "Abandon Stocks, Embrace Flows" from the Harvard Business Review.
     "Where's the money?" They asked: "Used to be the answer was simple: in stocks of knowledge. If you knew something valuable, something nobody else could access, you had, in effect, a license to print money. All you needed to do was to protect and defend that knowledge and then deliver products or services based on that knowledge as efficiently and as broadly as possible. Think of the proprietary formula for Coca-Cola, or the patents protecting blockbuster drugs in the pharma industry."
     "What if a different source of value is becoming more powerful? We believe there's a good reason to think that value is shifting from knowledge stocks to knowledge flows. Put more simply, we believe that flows trump stocks... To succeed now, we have to continually refresh our stocks of knowledge by participating in relevant flows of new knowledge."
     They also describe how others value those who participate and there I was creating and participating in the flow of new knowledge.  Wait, that's where Patreon comes in. We show value by liking, commenting, sharing, and paying for the things we love. It's exhilarating living in this world. Go check out Patreon. Become like the Medici family in Florence who were great patrons of the arts, supporting Rafael, Donatello, Michelangelo, and DaVinci. Together we make the world a beautiful place.