Roger Abramson: With Barriers To Entry So Low, What Stops People From Under-Cutting The Competition? (Part II)

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Business success isn’t hard-wired into your intuition.

Meaning your guess is as good as garbage. Why do you think eighty or ninety percent of businesses fail within five years? Because our best ideas prove useless alarmingly quickly, even though every one of our ideas seemed good at the time.

You’d think people would try to learn from these failures, but in fact they don’t.

• The average American reads one book per year.
• It’s typically not a business or finance book.
• The average reader makes it to page 18 and quits.

This should instantly tell you how ridiculously easily you can stand out from the crowd.

Learn a little to stand out a lot.

Where your gut can be pretty good: Do you feel like you can trust someone? If so, then either they’re trustworthy or they’re a sociopath. Just like a politician who’s learned to systematically engineer trust, or they might be a trickster. Here’s the problem:

In small communities, tricksters, cheaters, and players eventually get caught. In a tiny tribe, a cheater may trick a girl out of her virginity, but they’ll have to make an honest woman out of her or face banishment in the wilderness alone.

Maybe your gut feeling worked pretty well when you only knew 150 people in the whole world. In a tribe of seven billion people, tricksters easily fly under our radar.

Buying Behavior is Baffling

Human behavioral psychology is almost as baffling as any other technology. Being around people for your whole life doesn’t begin to qualify you to choreograph human buying behavior.

These days, to be successful, honest, hard-working people need to think, scheme, and calculate just like dishonest people do.

Old guys of mediocre success will tell you that experience is what counts. If so, then why utterly limit yourself to YOUR own single lifetime’s worth?

Multi-millionaires tell you trial and error is the least efficient way to learn. How do they learn? Tests, research, studying, and associating with ridiculously successful people.

Great ideas rarely find you.

You’ve got to seek them out. Take one good step toward great ideas, and they’ll take ten steps toward you, as this answer demonstrates.

When you find great ideas, you’ve got to grab on with both hands. Print out a copy. Pin it to your fridge. Follow it down the rabbit hole.

Hint: Follow the person with great, outstanding, self-evident ideas.

You’re right: The barrier to entry has been dropping ever since the U.S. Census started keeping track of success. Here’s the funny thing:

Exponential increases in opportunity have had almost no measurable effect on the relative distribution of wealth or income in over 60 years. The poorest half still retire broker than broke. Only one in twenty will ever wind up financially free, usually after a lifetime of simply making others rich.

People are motivated by emotion. Not reason.

People don’t believe in God because they saw a compelling pie chart. They didn’t perform a demographic study or comb through census data to arrive at their faith. The spirit moved them.

Click here for the third part of this four-part series.