It's Never too Late

Every generation thinks that there’s nothing new left to do, that all the possible things have already been done, wrote Kevin Kelly in 2014. Looking back, everyone thinks that the best opportunities lay just a decade or two ago. Take the Internet, for example. Here’s how most people today think of the Internet “opportunity” in the 90’s:

“The internet was a wide open frontier then. It was easy to be the first in category X. Consumers had few expectations, and the barriers were extremely low. Start a search engine! An online store! Serve up amateur videos!”

But now?

“Thirty years later the internet feels saturated, bloated, overstuffed with apps, platforms, devices, and more than enough content to demand our attention for the next million years. Even if you could manage to squeeze in another tiny innovation, who would notice it?”

 

Kelly points out that the abundance of today could not have possibly been foreseen by those who took the plunge in the 90’s:

“We got: Instant connection with our friends and family anywhere, a customizable stream of news whenever we want it, zoomable 3D maps of most cities of the world, an encyclopedia we can query with spoken words, movies we can watch on a flat slab in our pocket, a virtual everything store that will deliver next day — to name only six out of thousands that could be mentioned.”

 

Therefore, he says, don’t fret about the apparent lack of opportunities today. Most people didn’t see any opportunities in the 90’s either!

“If we could climb into a time machine and journey 30 years into the future, and from that vantage look back to today, we’d realize that most of the greatest products running the lives of citizens in 2044 were not invented until after 2014 (the year he wrote the article).”

 

His point? It’s never too late.

“There has never been a better time in the whole history of the world to invent something. There has never been a better time with more opportunities, more openings, lower barriers, higher benefit/risk ratios, better returns, greater upside, than now. Right now, this minute.”

 

Good advice indeed. Hard though it may be to imagine how. But then that’s the whole point of imagination – it’s not the lack of opportunities, it’s the scarcity of people who can visualize, take a chance, and make things happen.