Feb 28: The future you, cross chain connectivity, model simplifications & AI side effects
When you think about the future version of you, are you factoring in how much you'll learn and grow?
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In this Issue
🧠 Embracing a Growth Mindset for the Future: Shift from "Can I?" to "How can I?" by seeing challenges as learning opportunities, focusing on skills over results, and embracing feedback as fuel for growth.
💰 Caution in Financial Innovation: Financial models are simplifications, not reality—mistaking them for truth leads to failure. Progress in financial modeling is temporary, requiring constant adaptation.
🔗 Blockchain’s Evolution: From Silos to Interoperability: The Wormhole + Securitize partnership connects previously isolated blockchains, reducing liquidity fragmentation and making digital assets more accessible for investors, developers, and users.
📢 AI and Advertising: Unintended Consequences: AI-driven assistants may unintentionally blur the line between helpfulness and product promotion, raising concerns about control, transparency, and ethical ad integration.
🔄 Changing Narratives for Leadership Impact: Internal and industry-wide narratives shape decisions—effective change leaders challenge outdated stories to unlock new opportunities and drive transformation.
[perspective]
🪴Growth Mindset: The way you think about your future shapes the way you create it.
If you think about your future with a fixed mindset, you might see your abilities, intelligence, and opportunities as predetermined—believing that you either "have what it takes" or you don’t.
When you think about the future version of you, are you factoring in how much you'll learn and grow?
A growth mindset shifts the focus from what you have now to what you can build over time. It changes the question from “Can I?” to “How can I?”
👉 5 Ways to shift your thinking and apply a growth mindset to your future:
1️⃣ See Challenges as a Pathway, Not a Roadblock
Obstacles aren’t stop signs—they’re learning curves. The most successful people aren’t those who never fail, but those who keep learning and adapting until they succeed.
2️⃣ Focus on Skills, Not Just Outcomes
A growth mindset helps you shift from obsessing over results to focusing on the process of getting better. Instead of thinking, “I need to reach this goal or I’ve failed,” think, “What skills do I need to develop to get there?”
3️⃣ Rewrite the Story You Tell Yourself
Instead of saying “I’m not good at this,” try saying “I haven’t mastered this yet.” That one word—yet—can transform your self-perception from limitation to possibility.
4️⃣ Seek Feedback as Fuel for Growth
Many people avoid feedback because they fear criticism. But with a growth mindset, feedback isn’t judgment—it’s insight. The more you learn about how to improve, the faster you grow.
5️⃣ Play the Long Game
Short-term setbacks don’t define your long-term potential. Progress is rarely a straight line, and the most valuable growth often comes from persisting through difficulties rather than avoiding them.
🔮The future isn’t something that just happens to you—it’s something you create.
And the best way to shape it? Commit to the mindset that you can learn, adapt, and grow your way into the person you want to become.
If you’re feeling like the work you’ve poured your heart into is being undermined or that progress is slipping away, you’re not alone. In times like these, it’s easy to feel stuck or discouraged. But a growth mindset isn’t about blind optimism—it’s about resilience, adaptability, and impact in the face of challenges.
❓Common Questions about Growth Mindset
🔹 What if I’ve tried this before and still failed?
Failure isn’t proof you can’t grow. It’s part of the process. Adjust and try again.
🔹 What if I’m not naturally motivated?
Motivation follows action. Start small, build momentum, and discipline will carry you.
No matter where you are, you can start now. Growth isn’t just about surviving change—it’s about shaping it. Keep going.
💬 What’s one area of your life where you’re ready to apply a growth mindset? DM me on LinkedIn — I’d love to hear from you!
☣️ A Sensible Dose of Caution for Financial Innovation
The Financial Modelers Manifesto by Paul Willmot offers a concise yet timely reminder to guard against overconfidence when applying theory to practice. Though focused on finance, it delivers essential critical thinking that applies broadly to innovation.
The manifesto includes a Hippocratic Oath for financial modelers, emphasizing the need for a careful approach to financial innovation. It encourages us to be mindful of what financial models and simulators can and cannot reveal, fostering awareness of our assumptions and their resilience under real-world conditions.
A few highlights that stood out to me:
- Financial models are not the same thing as the real world...they always offer over simplified explanations that will not hold true in certain conditions. This Willmot refers to as "dirt swept under a rug." All models sweep dirt under the rug. A good model makes the absence of the dirt visible."
- "Statistics is shallow description, quite unlike the deeper cause and effect of physics, and can’t easily capture the complex dynamics...."
- Financial models have a fluctuating relationship with the real world: "there is no right model, because the world changes in response to the ones we use. Progress in financial modeling is fleeting and temporary. Markets change and newer models become necessary."
- "To confuse the model with the world is to embrace a future disaster" because human behavior does not follow, and cannot be explained by mathematical rules.
To avoid deluding ourselves about the true potential of any specific set of theoretical assumptions, the Manifesto recommends simple clear models with explicit assumptions about small numbers of variables.
🕸️The Next Evolutionary Step in Blockchain Architecture: From Fragmented Chains to an Interoperable Financial Network
BlackRock has partnered with Wormhole and Securitize to expand its tokenized fund offerings across multiple existing Layer 2 networks, enhancing accessibility and liquidity for investors. See PR Newswire and Wormhole.com for context.
The Wormhole + Securitize partnership is not just a technical upgrade—it signals a shift in blockchain architecture and market dynamics that could redefine how financial assets and decentralized networks operate. This shift follows a familiar pattern in technological evolution, where interoperability and liquidity aggregation unlock massive new levels of participation, efficiency, and opportunity.
The Old Model: Siloed Blockchains
- Historically, blockchains operated as separate ecosystems (e.g., Ethereum, Solana, Cosmos, Avalanche).
- Assets, liquidity, and users were often trapped within a single chain, limiting growth and efficiency.
- Developers had to choose one blockchain, making applications less accessible across the ecosystem.
The New Model: Cross-Chain Liquidity as a Foundational Layer
- Wormhole provides universal liquidity movement, allowing assets and users to operate seamlessly across multiple blockchains.
- Securitize enables real-world asset (RWA) tokenization, bringing institutional-grade liquidity into blockchain ecosystems.
- This is similar to how global banking networks (SWIFT, FedWire, ACH) connected isolated financial institutions, making capital flow globally and reducing inefficiencies.
🔹 Pattern: Just as cloud computing removed the need for companies to build their own data centers, cross-chain interoperability removes the need for blockchain ecosystems to develop in isolation.
Understanding Wormhole’s Cross-Chain Capabilities in Simple Terms
Imagine you have different types of bank accounts—one at Chase, one at Wells Fargo, and another at Bank of America. Normally, moving money between these banks takes time and fees because they operate as separate systems. Now, imagine if there was a tool that let you instantly transfer money between these banks as if they were all part of the same network. That’s what Wormhole does for blockchains.
What Does Wormhole Do?
Wormhole allows different blockchains—like Ethereum, Solana, and Cosmos—to talk to each other and share assets in a way that wasn't possible before. These blockchains usually function like separate islands with their own rules, tokens, and apps. Wormhole builds bridges between them, so users and assets can move freely without being stuck in one ecosystem.
What is Liquidity Fragmentation?
Liquidity is just how much money or assets are available in a market at any given time. If there's plenty of liquidity, it's easy to buy, sell, or trade assets without prices jumping around too much.
However, in the crypto world, liquidity is often scattered across many blockchains. For example:
- You might have $1 million of a token available on Ethereum
- $500,000 of the same token stuck on Solana
- Another $750,000 on Cosmos
If these pools can’t interact with each other, traders and investors face higher fees, slower transactions, and price inconsistencies across platforms. This is called liquidity fragmentation—when money is trapped in different blockchains instead of flowing freely.
How Does Wormhole Help?
Wormhole connects these isolated liquidity pools, making it easier for people to move assets between blockchains. This creates a bigger, unified market rather than a bunch of small, disconnected ones. The benefits include:
- Lower Costs – When liquidity is concentrated, transactions become cheaper.
- Faster Transactions – No need to wait for slow bridges or complicated token swaps.
- Better Prices – A unified pool of liquidity makes it easier to get fair prices when trading.
How this helps different industry participants:
- For institutions like BlackRock, which are exploring tokenized assets (e.g., real-world stocks and bonds represented on a blockchain), cross-chain liquidity makes these digital assets more usable and accessible. Investors won’t have to worry about being locked into one ecosystem—they can move their investments where they see the best opportunities.
- For blockchain developers, it means their apps can reach more users across different chains instead of being limited to just one platform.
- For regular users, it means fewer headaches when swapping between tokens and fewer fees when moving assets around.
The Big Picture
Wormhole and its adoption represents a shift toward making all blockchains work together like a single, connected financial system rather than a bunch of isolated networks. This can help make crypto more user-friendly, scalable, and attractive to institutional investors.
‼️AI's Integration into Advertising brings unintended impacts
This week a popular GPT GenAI Agent tried to sell me a software product when I was brainstorming productivity approaches. From all appearances this was not the intention of the platform owners, nor is there any evidence of a product placement arrangement between the respective firms.
As GenAI agents replace ad-supported web search, the question arises: Is AI capable of enabling a safe advertising process that stays on task and within guardrails? Not likely, according to this WIRED investigation into Google's ad ecosystem.
[change leadership learning series]
This week's lesson: The power of narratives, and how to change them:
You and I have a set of internal narratives that guide our reactions and the way we quickly connect things, and make snap judgments. Over time these narratives can start to feel like the only reality that is possible. Your organization or industry likewise has conventional wisdom and status quo thinking that has formed over time.
Change Leaders can increase their impact by learning how to identify, challenge and change these narratives.
Click here for an overview of the full Change Leadership Learning Series.
[playbooks]
- Spend Wisely in a Hype-Driven World
- Gaining Buy-in for Data Modernization
- Flipping the Script: Understanding and Changing Internal & Macro Narratives
- Shift to effective gatekeeping in the age of generative AI
- How to Stop Zombie Projects from Sapping your Focus and Resources
- Harmonize Different Kinds of Expertise to Achieve Success
- Addressing issues related to uneven accountability
- Validating AI use cases
- 6 Proven Ways to Resolve Conflicts
See Full List of S3T Playbooks
Opinions expressed are those of the individuals and do not reflect the official positions of companies or organizations those individuals may be affiliated with. Not financial, investment or legal advice, and no offers for securities or investment opportunities are intended. Mentions should not be construed as endorsements. Authors or guests may hold assets discussed or may have interests in companies mentioned.
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