After Labor Day 2021, we are going to experience a massive transformation never before seen in anyone living today. One thing people better do, they better forget whatever happened before 2020 because that way of life is never coming back. This is the moment you have to adopt and adapt to massive change coming down the pipeline. This is a worldwide matter and everybody has to re-vet everything around them and about them.

We are not talking about the pandemic as a factor, digitalization is a bigger impact already in play before the pandemic. Let’s talk about a couple of factors you have to consider.

Entrepreneurial Ventures. You are going to have to be realistic in our current environment. Avoid pure-play tangible products, focus instead on product-service systems. Look also leveraging platforms as a service instead of building or outsourcing. Learn payment systems and cloud platform offerings. It is a lot cheaper and simpler to launch business operations nowadays – learn the new technology such as event-driven systems.

Education. This is a bigger topic than structured education where your kids have to work from home. Make sure your kids learn to learn on their own and do their own research and practice sprints. To be honest, the schools don’t make smart kids, smart kids make themselves by owning their education process. You have to be the same way as an adult, you cannot be following clowns like charlatans on social media – focus on where you want to go and find credible people and credible circles to advance your education to empower yourself on your goals. Get true industry certifications.

Career. I’m sorry but the thought of you thinking of “returning to your job” or “return to office” is a joke and you and I know this. If you go back to a job to work in this paradigm shift, you lost and that’s just the truth. You should realize by now you take ownership of your profession and your career by expanding beyond tasks for your employer. You realize that you always work for yourself, you do tasks for employers. You create assets such as blogs, podcasts, white papers, and network with real colleagues. Do not screw up your career joking with clown co-workers; most of them didn’t even contact you in 2020 while the office was closed – you stay focus on yourself, your family, and your growth in your career and focus on building your brand.

Health and Quality of Life. This is the moment you need to ask are you in the right environment for quality of life? Are you single in New York, Chicago, and Baltimore full of urban violence, and have you realized you should have moved to Atlanta or Dallas and secured a nice condo with other single folks like yourself to mingle? Be at a park with a meetup group to do group walks or group yoga and meet new folks? Think about if this is the movement to move. The second thing is to look at your diet and learn to cook well and reward yourself. If you want to move to New York or Los Angeles with rent cheap; this is the time to move for that quality of life. If you are on the South Side of Chicago; you are an idiot if you haven’t moved to Georgia or Texas for a better quality of life and better higher-paying jobs.

Service Sector. The issue with the service sector is we got employers that want to keep the status quo of low-wage jobs instead of transforming the service sector as a stakeholder agency.  Look people need to be treated with more value than that. We saw the dirty conservative tactic of canceling unemployment benefits. The new paradigm that cannot be avoided is the service sector is not a monolith. There is real talent, real influencers that can draw more business than the average service worker.  This is going to be a talent-driven industry and service industries better realize this paradigm, good talent will be poached and paid well. Companies focused on minimum wage service workers going to fail with low-quality, don’t care workers driving away customers.

Housing. The rental industry is going corporate and the goal is to squeeze out smaller landlords. This will result in gentrification and flatlining housing as a service. You are going to see new innovations such as lifestyle mixed-used condos offering luxury perks and you going to see room-based rentals for broke folks with evictions on their records. Homelessness is going to be massive due to marginalization as a result of the paradigm shift of technology-driven housing options. Owning a home is not going to be as special (never was) in this new paradigm, owning spaces that deliver unique experiences is the future of housing.

Retail and Supply Chain. The biggest disrupter is distributed ledger technology or blockchain technology. We are looking at event-driven systems and trustless ledgers that allow faster inventory replenishment and faster payments at the supply chain level. For customers, the cash checkout is going away as digital payments, buy online and pickup is taking shape. Another option is the Buy-Now-Pay-Later is already taking over the industry where customers apply for loans through their mobile phone and check out with a QR code or confirmation code.

Travel. Tourism travel during a pandemic is stupid and folly; people don’t know how to stay at home and handle things and trying to escape. Nations are not looking for tourists – the world is looking for digital nomads and wealth to set up shop in their nations by offering visas in exchange for living in their nation to spend money on the local economy. So you guys traveling for a week or so, expect not to be welcomed during this current environment. That’s why they got 14-day quarantine to keep folks spending vacation days to go to places. They want digital nomads and wealth showing up instead.

You are going to have to sit down and position yourself as to where you going to fit in and how you going to move. If you want to move from the South Side of Chicago, then this is the time when housing in New York and Los Angeles is cheap right now. If you want to set up a business in downtown Atlanta with cheap commercial rent space, this is the time right now. You don’t sit at your job doing tasks; you start focusing on getting your name out as a brand in your profession and screw what your co-workers think; they are not your friends anymore.

Focus on digital-first ventures and platform cloud-based event-driven workflows in 2021. We are already moving in this paradigm and anybody who is not on this kind of digitalization platform will not be able to effectively keep up with the paradigm shift.  We need a lot of new types of ventures no one is thinking about. We need podcast studios that also professionally produce podcast shows for distribution. We need digital advertising experts that know how to create digital signage and click-through signage and contextual placements in our communities. We need white papers to read on the how-to on adopting and adapting to the current paradigm.

We are not going back to anything – the future is here and it’s time to prepare for the paradigm shift and all the opportunities ahead of us.