I enjoy looking ahead at the future. I like to think about what advances are coming with the next round of mobile devices, or try to see how life might be in 20 years if electric vehicles keep improving. Some of my guesses are right, some are wrong, but it’s fun to try.
When it comes to business, though, seeing the future is essential. You still might miss some, but taking some shots is worthwhile in the hopes that you might hit some.
Famous basketball coach John Wooden said “When opportunity comes, it’s too late to prepare“. In his case, he was referring to game situations that you needed to be prepared for, but I see this in our company quite a bit as well.
In Business
If a new prospect approaches us with an idea that we’re not prepared to handle, we generally need to turn it down. Sometimes that’s an intentional “no that leads to a yes“, but sometimes it’s something we should have been able to handle so we need to work harder to be prepared for when the next opportunity comes along.
Related is the idea that if you can see the profitability of an opportunity, it’s probably too late to seize it. Think of things like Bitcoin or NFTs; by the time most people heard about them, it was too late to really cash in. Sure, there’s still some money to be made, but people that were early in Bitcoin made multi-million percent interest on their initial investment. If you wait until an idea is proven to be profitable, you can do alright but you’ve missed the big gains that were once possible.
Pizza for Bitcoin
The fun example of that is the “Bitcoin Pizza Guy” who spent 10,000 bitcoin for a few pizzas back in 2010. The value of those Bitcoin back then was around $40, and even after the recent drop in Bitcoin value it’s still worth $245,000,000 today.
We’re all too late for that opportunity, but I’ll keep making predictions and taking shots, and hopefully some of them will work out in great ways.
What are some things you see coming in the next few years?
