Sometimes the universe presents you with amazing opportunities. Although they don’t always look obvious at the time. And history laughs at people who passed up on the opportunity to invest in the next big thing.
Kodak owned the market when it came to camera film and had a huge chunk of the camera market as well.
In 1975 one of their engineers, Steve Sasson, informed his supervisors at Kodak he’d created an early version of the digital camera. You’d think upper management would be thrilled when he told them that. Not so much…
They laughed and then did everything in their power to suppress the technology as they considered it a threat to their core business of selling film.
Fast forward a few years and the digital camera became a thing. As a result of Kodak not embracing and pioneering digital, they went from thriving to just barely surviving. The very opportunity that should’ve made them billions practically killed the company. And made them the laughing stock of their industry.
There’s a similar story about Steve Wozniak when he worked at Hewlett-Packard. He showed his bosses the personal computer he was building and they laughed telling him people would never use computers in their homes. So, Woz and his buddy Steve Jobs started Apple Computers in their garage. And the market laughed again…
In 2000, Blockbuster video could’ve bought a struggling little mail order DVD company for $50 million. But their CEO laughed at the startup saying the price was ludicrous. Today Netflix is worth more than $70 billion and Blockbuster is history. Who got the last laugh?
In 2005, MySpace had the opportunity to buy Facebook but they decided against it. Mark Zuckerberg is laughing all the way to the bank.
This list could go on forever, but you get the lesson…
The marketplace rewards action takers.
And those action takers always get the last laugh. Are you among that crowd or are they laughing at you?
Remember, we will always regret the opportunities we don’t take far more than the ones we do.
While it might not rank as one of the biggest missed opportunities in business, last week you had the opportunity to buy a copy of my best-selling book Stadium Status for $12.97. Now today it’s $24.97.
At that price it’s still a great investment as it can easily provide you with an ROI exponentially greater than the price.
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