Becoming An Early Adopter: Why We Avoid Change And How To Fix It

 

Why are we so afraid of change? How can we grow if we’re not willing to step outside our comfort zone? Listen to your host Halle Eavelyn as she shares why we should become early adopters and how we can adapt to changes. The world of cryptocurrency and digital transactions is proliferating, and we must know how to get comfortable with it by getting educated. Halle emphasizes that cryptocurrency and blockchain technology are really here to stay. Tune in to learn how we can rewire ourselves to think differently and embrace these changes.

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Becoming An Early Adopter: Why We Avoid Change And How To Fix It

I have been thinking about Baz Luhrmann’s ELVIS movie ever since I saw it. I was especially intrigued to see that Elvis was almost arrested. In the movie, he was arrested but in real life, he was almost arrested for dancing. What I was thinking about is the idea that Elvis was more subversive than we thought. We look at him now and we think, “He was tame compared to what we see now.”

There was a judge in the State of Florida, Jacksonville, who was so close to arresting him that warrants had been issued. As shown in the movie, there were policemen stationed in every exit to make sure that Elvis couldn’t get out should he have even wriggled his hips a little bit. The judge said that his hip movement was animalistic and vulgar. Elvis said apparently at the time that it didn’t have anything to do with sex. He was like, “I can’t sit still when I sing.”

I thought about this a lot. In fact, I know all this now because I researched it and I looked into it more deeply. When we see things like Jennifer Lopez’s and Shakira’s halftime performance a couple of years ago at the Super Bowl or the way a lot of rappers dressed in general or any Madonna concert going back to the ’80s, there has been a real shift between what that judge was thinking of when he was declaring something vulgar and animalistic and what we now consider a perfectly normal Tuesday in the music business.

What has happened is that we have evolved. We have gotten used to it. What does that have to do with your money? What does that have to do with crypto? It’s everything because there has been so much controversy about the introduction of cryptocurrency or blockchain technologies. There’s so much fear around it. Yet, it is very indicative of how we not only as a society but as a human race act when we are confronted with change or when we’re confronted with something new.

Digital currency has not only been floated. It is now receiving a lot of acceptance. And there is an expectation that in the next year or two that the banks will launch a central bank digital currency. Click To Tweet

Our general reaction tends to be we get super uncomfortable at first, and then with continued exposure, slowly things become comfortable enough that we start to get more accepting. This is no different from trying to get a kid to eat broccoli. They say it takes between 5 and 10 exposures to a vegetable for a child to stop saying how much they hate it.

By the way, I was in a restaurant the other night and the kids’ menu was, “I don’t want that, I hate that, I’ve not going to eat that, and I’m not hungry.” It was the usual chicken tenders and macaroni and cheese, but those were the titles of the items. I thought that was very clever, but that’s because most kids don’t like to do anything new and we are no different by the time we become adults.

I wanted to share with you a list of things that have been considered not acceptable by the people at large, by the decision-makers, by the lawmakers, or by people in general over the years. I didn’t go back very far. I went back to the beginning of the 20th century. Women voting, which I pulled one quote, “Women voting would turn back the hands of time by a thousand years.” That was the belief of the men and this was from a particular gentleman whose name should be lost to history. I didn’t quote him. He did say that by letting women vote, we would turn back the hands of time by a thousand years. That was a general sentiment before women had the right to vote.

We then are going to put women in schools and that was a terrible idea because educating women would bring them out of the home. It would make them not want to have their rightful place and worse than that, it would make them question their husbands. We had love, honor and obey. There was no obey on the man’s side. Obey was on the woman’s side. You had to obey your husband when you married him and those were in your wedding vows. That meant to obey him in all things. If we educated women, they might not want to obey their husbands, so it’s a terrible idea.

 

There were co-ed schools. The idea was that women were not only allowed in schools but that they should be allowed to distract men. There was a similar concern for a very long time. I don’t think that it has gone away fully that women shouldn’t be in the Army or other military branches. Even if they are allowed, they shouldn’t be in combat. That’s something we still struggle with now. The idea of having men and women interact in an educational environment or an environment that is considered to be the male environment exclusively is not supposedly okay.

We then had racially integrated schools. I could find a lot of quotes talking about what a terrible idea it would be if people of different colors and races were allowed to be in school together. I don’t like to perpetuate those terrible stereotypes, but I will say there were a lot of stupid people for a long time who thought that people of different races shouldn’t interact and were willing to take those terrible ideas and put them into laws and make it illegal for you to do anything different.

Speaking of music, back to Elvis, a couple of years ago, I saw a picture of Ella Fitzgerald wearing a mink coat sitting with another Black woman wearing a mink coat. The two of them were sitting huddled together with their heads in their hands behind prison bars because Ella had been arrested for singing in front of a White audience. That’s the stuff where it gets lost to history, but that one picture to me spoke so much about such a misguided time in our history.

It’s about us allowing ideas that are better than the old ideas to supplant the old ideas. There are a lot of kicking and screaming when that happens. Let’s go back to the financial things. We’re going to skip forward a couple of generations. Online shopping back in the ’90s. I remember when Amazon was the stupidest thing ever. I didn’t find any quotes about that, but I can tell you the people that I was working with in Seattle when Amazon launched thought it was a terrible idea.

We are wired differently. Some of us are more wired for risk and some of us less. So some of us are more wired for change and for trying new things. Click To Tweet

Why wouldn’t you want to go into a bookstore to buy books? Why was this company that was selling books calling itself, Amazon? Why on earth would you give anybody your credit card? The idea of taking payments digitally was also terrifying to a lot of people, and for good reason. There was a lot of fraud with digital payments. There still is a lot of fraud with digital payments.

I remember back in the early 2000s, it was a Friday and my bank closed over the weekend. This was before there were online banks that did that transaction. The smaller banks didn’t do it. My bank would close on a Friday and then it would open on Monday. There were no transactions processed online over the weekend, but they did have online banking.

Between Friday and Monday, somebody came in, impersonated me, got a bunch of $200 gift cards from Target or something, cashed them in, got all their merchandise, and went home. The bank didn’t know about it until Monday. I was protected. My transactions were insured, but the bank lost the money. That thing happened a lot when digital transactions were occurring.

At the time, I tried to report it and they said that the authorities were about six months behind with digital impersonation. Now, they are something like five years behind or something. If you wanted a career as a criminal, doing illegal digital transactions would probably be pretty lucrative because nobody has time to chase down anything unless it’s big. It’s a little bit sad and scary.

 

There was this period where everybody said digital transactions were a terrible idea because of fraud, and yet now we don’t have any issues. Especially, during the pandemic people who were not interested in doing digital transactions moved into doing digital transactions. People who were not interested in participating in that kind of transaction had no choice. As they got more comfortable, they started to do more of it to the point where Amazon’s profits soared during the pandemic.

There are all kinds of other things that we could talk about. I gave you some examples from a cross-cut of history and a cross-cut of both financial and non-financial transactions, but I did want to give you one more. I found a quote from 2018 from a think tank researcher who said, “Central bank having a digital currency was one of the worst financial ideas of recent times.” That was in the middle of 2018, and now it’s the middle of 2022 and a central bank digital currency has not only been floated, but it is now receiving a lot of acceptance.

There is an expectation that in the next few years that the banks will launch a central bank digital currency. Why would they do that? It’s so that they can get on the crypto bandwagon. They’ve not been able to kill crypto. It’s like, “If you can’t beat them, join them.” What does this mean for you? I always like to ask that question when I’m thinking about what content I’m creating for these episodes, and when I also think about why you would care to listen.

If you’re not comfortable with cryptocurrency and with the idea of maybe even digital currency at this point, you will find that the more exposure that you get to it, the more comfortable you can get. What would you do to get exposure? Listening to the podcast is a good start. Getting an education is a way to get comfortable. We often fear what we don’t understand and don’t know. Getting to know something and learn about it is often the best way of getting more comfortable with it.

Cryptocurrency and blockchain technology are really here to stay. Click To Tweet

I encourage you to get educated and continue to tune in to more episodes of the show. Like and share it with your friends, and let all of the women in your life know about it. I feel like we are wired differently. Some of us are more wired for risk and some of us less so. Some of us are more wired for change and some of us are not so much. Some of us are more wired for trying new things or being early adopters versus being the last one to join in something. You know where you fit on any one of those scales.

However, cryptocurrency and blockchain technology is here to stay. I talked about this in an episode. Seventy-five percent of retailers that were surveyed by Deloitte said that they expected to be taking some form of cryptocurrency within the next few years. I was at the Bitcoin Conference, and I’ve spoken about this in a previous episode as well, when Strike announced that they had made deals with all of the major retailers and in-person cash point transaction companies to be able to accept crypto at Walmart, Chipotle, Target, Safeway, and all of those types of places.

As you put your Apple Pay card down now inside of your Apple Wallet, you also will be able to do that simply using your crypto wallet. For us, it’s going to look pretty transparent. The retailers are so incentivized to do this. That’s an important point. When a retailer is incentivized to make a change quickly, they’re answering the question, what’s in it for them and they can see something big is in it for them.

That’s true for all of us when we’re making changes. The retailer in this case is very incentivized because they’re paying somewhere between 2.25% and 3.5% on every single transaction, and it’s taking several days with the bank. The promise of the lightning network with the company Strike is that these transactions will begin to cost less than a penny and they will be instant. I can put in any crypto and that retailer is going to see their US dollars, Euros, or whatever the currency is in their bank account the same day. The transaction will take place so fast that even the volatility of the crypto market won’t matter because it’s that peer-to-peer transaction.

We’re seeing in the future very quickly that a billion people at the current rate of adoption which is 1 in 7 people in the world, including all the undeveloped countries. If you say 4 billion people in the major developed countries, we would be looking at 1 in 4 people at that point would have adopted crypto within the next few years.

That’s very fast. It means there’s going to be this enormous acceleration. Do you need to be afraid of that? You don’t. Do you want to participate in it? That’s a choice. There are people who are off-grid now who will never get to read this because they won’t have anything to do with the internet or Wi-Fi. Those are choices that you get to make, but those are usually people who got educated enough to understand whether that was something that they wanted or didn’t want.

I want to encourage you to get the education that you want to decide whether you like change before you make a decision about whether you want to participate in the change or not. I hope this episode has been helpful to you. I hope that you will like it, comment on it, and share it with your wives, mothers, girlfriends, partners, and all of the beloved women in your life. I will see you next time.