Looking To The Future For Your Next Opportunity

Whatever our idea was that formed the basis of our business, it was something new and different from what already existed. Maybe there weren’t huge changes relative to your competitors, but there was some difference that set you apart. It was an idea of the moment, meant to capture needs and market inefficiencies and a customer base not entirely satisfied with existing options, and with any luck, it worked in your favor. 

Now you, like every other company before you, face the next great obstacle in your path to continued success: the future. The future is challenging because it is unknowable and seemingly ever-changing. If you look back to predictions from five or ten or even twenty years ago as to the state of the world today, it’s evident how hard it is to know with any degree of certainty what is going to happen. Predictions made today as to what will happen throughout the 2020s will probably look as off-base in a few years’ time. There’s too much unknown about the unknown to know what the future holds, as much as we may want to. 

That’s tough for us as humans, particularly living through such turbulent times, and equally so as entrepreneurs. We plan for the future with a set of assumptions, so thinking that those assumptions have little bearing on reality the further out they get from the present is frustrating, to say the least. It’s hard enough to formulate plans based on our ideas of what happens within a specific market, to say nothing of having to take into account what’s going on in the world at large. Trying to think through all of it is enough to make you want to give up. 

On its face, that sort of uncertainty doesn’t offer much benefit to anyone, no silver lining or hidden opportunity. But perhaps that lack of information and understanding is exactly what we need. 

Too often we can be constrained by our understanding of the possible, at least as it’s accepted in the public sphere. We limit ourselves based on what is an understanding of what can or should be done because we’re social creatures programmed to go along with the pack. Narratives become set in our minds as fact long before they are in the world at large, and they take hold because they become the dominant narrative — an ouroboros eating its own tail. Thus we restrict our own thinking about what we can do based upon ideas of what’s going to happen, even though no one truly knows what’s going to happen.

What if we were to move boldly in the direction of our biggest ideas, with no thought as to what might happen, what should happen, or what is supposed to happen? We might strain against the idea and the risk that it represents, knowing that while some risk is good, too much is not what we want for ourselves and our businesses. And that’s certainly right in the sense of being risky with money, IP protection, and insurance, representing all of the foundational things we should be concerned about. But is it a risk to think our ideas too far outside of the framework of an assumed future? 

Look around yourself now, at all the things that fill your office or home or wherever you might be that didn’t exist — could never exist— a generation or two ago. All started modestly, and all probably have some record of someone, somewhere saying that they could never exist in the form they do now if they existed at all. That’s not to say that your ideas have to be the next computer, television, or world-changing idea; simply that expectations and predictions have little bearing on what’s actually possible. 

Where others see uncertainty in the future, there is a blank canvas. And while you will undoubtedly be beset and affected by the circumstances that unfold, we can’t operate as though we know for sure what they will be. That sort of fear and caution is not what we got into business for, nor should it be what guides our actions. So do the thing that you might have been hesitant to try because of future forecasts because your guess as to the future is as good as any. #onwards.