Throwing Darts
Throwing darts could be a useful metaphor for life and attempts at bat.
Darts do need a clear target -- this could be one's higher purpose or missiong.
Darts are attempting lots of things, small bets, trying new things -- but switching around the dart board may make it difficult to get points.
In the dart board game, even things that wildly miss the center, as long as they are on the board, earn some kind of points.
The question, though, seems like a matter of defining the board that accumulates points.
I listened to an entrepreneur who started on the path to "self-improvement" and his underlying dart board was to make his life better.
As a result, he tried lots of different things as he learned: blogging, information products, consulting, software, YouTubing and now crypto.
He had different dart throws, but he seems to have been largely focused on making money.
However, often there is a shiny object syndrome of trying to make money: chasing after one fad or the other.
And this same entrepreneur said the same thing: stick with one thing, they all, in some way, make money. Some have a higher upfront capital requirement, like building a SaaS, but it does seem that going all in on something seems to be successful.
However, what I found early on was that those who focused their products on "how to make money" were the most successful,, and so this seems to be where the grift was.
This category has and continues to be the most competitive, largely because it has the most demand.
But this also seemed to be, for the most part, much less appealing.
Why would I try to enter this space? It does seem many who are wealthy have had no problem entering the space despite like of knowledge or a difference between what they say to do and what they actually do.
So I think in some industries, this ability to say what people want to hear, to ticklet their ears, has a higher value.
This is sort of what turned me off from the information products space altogether, although clearly it is the lowest capital investment and the highest potential return.
Perhaps the best kind of "dart" in this realm is proven personal experience; or perhaps those that manage to find very specific niches.
Tim Ferris illustrates how to amass huge wealth and influence by focusing on the core needs: money, health, and time. The one book area that is missing is relationships -- but you can see a similar pattern amongst gurus like Tony Robbins who includes the relationship pillar in his content.
In terms of business, it seems like the most successful focus on things like "increase revenue" -- weather through sales, marketing, or product. Another genre that has alot of competition is "leadership" -- and I don't know exactly what the need is that is met there.
I suspect for a small minority, there are people in leadership or who aspire to become leaders, learn about it; some who are leaders have a desire to appear as good leaders, but this can easily become a case where all the suggestions are aspirational, but hard to implement.
Good leadership could also be seen as a means to an end -- increase the success and profitability of the business. And in that regard, it's probably also appealing.
It's a form of leverage and productivity.
My current thought is that picking the right dart board is far more critical than many of the optimizations.
This isn't widely taught; but I think some very pragmatic people like David internalized this to their benefit.
For example, the Cantillon Effect, which rewards those closest to the injection of money. A similar idea is to be closer to the largest pools of money.
So investors, banks, government contractors, private equity firms -- those who are closest to the largest pools of money and can offer services on the deployment of this capital are more likely to make money.
Those who are furthers and deal with smaller pools of money - teachers, counselors -- typically make less.
Companies or vehicles that are close to surging demand, unicorns in the SaaS world, tend to make more money, especially if they have both scale and can go upmarket.
Picking the right vehicle, however, is super hard, but it can be the best path to learning and to wealth.
For example, those who rightly saw that Google had an infinitely large market of advertising by essentially becoming the portal for people onto the Internet, just needed to stay in the game to be wealthy.
Similar with Facebook, which also positioned itself as the gateway for mass numbers of people to need to get onto the Internet.
This is what has fueled Aggregation Theory, and it's super hard to imagine a way to disrupt many of these players.
But to those who had the foresight goes the spoils.