Afternoon Folks!!
I have said for years that the highest and best use for the Internet and the Internet's BIGGEST company have not even been born yet. I said that before Google and before Facebook and I can say it today and PROVE it!
So let me show you the historic parallel that will prove my point. It will also show you why patience IS the key. THE key.
TV was to my father as the Internet is to us. An "Interactive TV" would be one way to describe the Internet. Now while the modern TV was invented in the 1920's (my dad would have been a teenager) something happened in 1939 that changed history and the world forever. That event as I learned just yesterday was a national broadcast of the first major league baseball game.
Now think what has happened since that one event. Not just baseball but all of sport! It was not limited. Just one USE of this new medium gave birth to something that today has dozens if not hundreds of channels devoted to broadcasting sports. Some of the highest paid advertising in the world is around sports.
So the most important thing to understand about the net to get the most out of being a domain investor is to realize there is a stage to collect and a stage to sell. Your circumstance will dictate that to you and for you. But if you keep circumstance at bay, that buys you time. Time is the key. My entire plan revolves around buying the time needed to hurdle of the graves of businesses that did not make it and land on the wings of those that have and those that will. And the reason is such strong parallels in so many unrelated industries. Only connected by sales and profits.
I am no visionary. I am Rip Van Winkle and the job was to fill in a 20 year canyon as comfortably as possible and find as many parallels as possible. Because in these 20 years the world would change over and over and over again and it would take many more years to fully exploit this new dimension we all find ourselves in. Evolution takes time and ideas building on each other.
So pick a parallel. Each parallel is a rainbow to me. I am just overwhelmed by the amount of rainbows all lined up one after another in industry after industry after industry. All connected by common goals and uncommon goals that still lead the way forward. All in search of that pot of gold.
Think how many people make a living from Facebook without working or even having a relationship with the company. Same with Google. Same with Apple. Folks fill in the voids they find with new products. Sometimes with great success and some you will never see. MOST you will never see. MOST will never break the surface. But those that do will find what they are looking for.
Besides the formative years of techies the Internet is really only 10-15 years old in "Consumer years". Maybe less than that. I watched how long it took for some folks. I would say in the last 5 years we finally hit "Critical mass". We have yet to hit "Critical Understanding". Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn help propel many forward.
We have NOT reached "Critical Etiquette" where folks learn to conduct themselves with character online. Being a "Professional" but having no "Character" is a monumental difference and one certainly trumps the other. Reputation repair proves that. One of the hottest sectors of the Internet. All those pros that need an eraser to fix the bad stuff they have done. Pretty sad!
For years I have said we are in "Spring Training". Today I can declare that spring training is finally over. The real season has actually begun this summer. We are in the first inning. That's it. The game to me and how I see things, first inning. Time to get in your seats. Knowledge leads to more productive conversations and that is the kindling needed to make things happen. When you reach the point where you can't fool folks any longer with charm and bullshit.
They know impression based advertising is for fools that like to piss all their money down the drain. They know it is all about targeting and now they are starting to ask the right questions and Facebook is giving them some of the right answers. Google may start playing catch up. LinkedIn is flexing some muscle.
I mean how would you approach things if you knew and understood just how early we still are in all this? How fast we have come with a HUGE project that billions are involved in. Ideas will change each day and with each new idea newer ideas come as well. The Great Wall was built and a great achievement by man. Or men and women. What we are creating now is much bigger, much more grand and 1000x more important.
It's the greatest "Poverty Killer" ever invented. We are making our fortunes in a virtual world. An added and new dimension of connectivity. More opportunity born daily than anyone or any group could even chronicle or record.
My dad was 88 when he died in the late 1990's. He would write computer programs with a radio shack tape recorder. He spanned someof the greatest eras ever. He was alive before WW1. Product of the Roaring 20's. Prohibition. Survived the Great Depression. Served during WW2. Worked on Top Secret stuff during the Korean War and Vietnam and then up until the early 1970's. That's when folks could actually keep a secret.
He was an Electrical Engineer by trade. He managed to self educate himself in everything from that to electronics to plumbing to building an addition to our home by himself. He could fix anything. But when he embraced computers and then the Internet like he was 18, that was very important to see and understand and then act on.
I saw at that time just how the young and the old would embrace this medium and those caught in the middle would eventually be forced by social pressures and necessity to follow along many years later. That was my first conclusion back in the mid 1990's and I credit my dad for giving me that perspective.
When it comes to the Internet, we too are mostly self-educated. We had to learn things first hand and stumble along. There was no luxury of having a "Book" to follow or success to copy. So in that respect, many of us are like my dad. Just in a new medium with virtual electric and virtual plumbing and lots of other virtual this's and that's.
That's what "Trailblazing" is all about. It's in the blood. Life is always looking for the cutting edge.
Study how towns and cities grew to be where they are and why and you harness the power of the past and apply it to the future and in different mediums. Study different industries and how they expanded and unfolded and what and who became important. Study the past to SEE the future.
We are pilots of another era but the paths are similar and they absolutely do repeat themselves when you link the proper parallels. That allows you to position yourself to be between parallels BEFORE they intersect and produce the gold.
Rick Schwartz
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