Surprising as it sounds, I think that the answer for the question in the title is “no” for most of us (myself included). I’ll explain what I mean by that.
You probably agree that being able to identify where the Internet and technology in general are moving is one of the most profitable skills one can have, right?
For example, the people who first saw the potential of the World Wide Web are all millionaires today (some are billionaires). If you were lazy you just needed to register a handful of domain names (e.g., pizza.com, beer.com, business.com) and sell them for a fortune some years down the road. If you had a more entrepreneurial spirit you could start an online business, perhaps to sell books, perhaps to sell computers.
At this point you might be saying “Sure, back in the day it was easy, but these days such opportunities are all gone.”
Well, this affirmation sounds quite similar to the one made by Charles H. Duell, Commissioner of the U.S. Patents Office, in 1899 (mark the year). He said: “Everything that can be invented has been invented.“. Needless to say he became quite famous after that….
In other words, as long as the world is changing there will always be new opportunities, new markets, new business models. And the Internet is only accelerating the rate at which change is happening around the world.
Want examples? Just think about Zynga. They identified that social networks would become one of the largest platforms for games, and started developing games for MySpace and Facebook before most companies. Today Zynga is worth over $10 billion.
So yeah identifying the next big thing is possible even today. The problem I see is that most people (again, myself included, else I would be building my next big company instead of writing this post…) use the wrong approach to identify changes and new opportunities.
Here’s the problem: Most people try to understand the future and see upcoming opportunities by reading the news and commentary from journalists, bloggers and what not. Guess what, if those people had the answers they wouldn’t be writing about them either, they would be building their own websites/companies. Sometimes there are gold nuggets around, but once it gets published online everyone else will also have access to it, and some people will probably move faster than you.
The solution? You need to use your own brain. Sure, information you can grab around the Internet, on newspapers and on television can help. But if you want to have an edge over other people you’ll need to do your own thinking, your own analysis, take your own conclusions and bet your time/money on them.
Sounds too abstract? Well, here’s the practical side of it: instead of browsing around the web all day long, reading news sites and blogs every 5 minutes, checking what everyone is up to on Facebook and what not, take 20 minutes per day to actually sit down and put your ideas on paper. Write about the segments you think will grow over the coming years. Research some numbers and try to understand why they are behaving as they are. Write about the technologies you think will change how people do things and so on. One day you might get an insight that no one has had yet.
I am not saying it’s easy, but it’s probably the only way to go if you want to come up with something big/profitable, so why not try it?
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