Welcome to the Action Digest, where we cut through complexity like a hot knife through an ice cream cake.

A glimpse at the action we’re bringing you this week:

• 🌟 We learn a crucial question for discovering the difference between an opportunity of a lifetime and a lost cause.

• 📺 A U.S. President reveals why we miss so many big opportunities, even when they’re right in front of us.

• 🏄‍♀️ An internet billionaire gives us a simple exercise to successfully ride the next big wave of opportunity.

P.s., you can check out editions 1-29 here in case you missed them, including insights such as the mindset that helped an entrepreneur build seven different billion-dollar companies, how Steve Jobs cultivated great creative taste, and why success might be much closer than we thought possible.

Seriously, there are some gems you’ll appreciate in these earlier editions ;-)

1. During a gold rush, sell shovels

Near the beginning of 1848, a Californian named Samuel Brannan noticed something odd while working at the store he owned near Sacramento. 

Customers were increasingly paying for goods with pieces of gold. 

One customer, when pressed, revealed a secret that had been discovered a few months prior: the nearby riverbanks were laced with precious metal! 

Brannan visited the riverbanks to see for himself and, sure enough, found evidence of a goldmine before his eyes. 

Most people would have focused on digging. Instead, Brannan scooped up a piece of gold into a bottle and then raced to the nearby town of San Francisco. Upon arrival, Brannan reportedly ran through the streets, brandishing the bottle above his head, yelling: “Gold! Gold from the American river!” 

Word spread fast after Brannan’s publicity stunt. Within a month, 75% of the men in San Francisco had left town in search of gold. Hundreds of thousands of Americans would soon join them from all across the country. 

So why didn’t Brannan just focus on digging as much gold out of the ground as possible? 

Why spill the beans and waste his opportunity to take advantage of the secret? 

Maybe it’s because he stocked his store with enough picks, shovels, and pans to supply an army of miners. 

At the peak of the gold rush, Brannan was making almost $200,000 a day (in today’s dollars) and ultimately became California’s first ever millionaire. 

Brannan’s success seems like a magical mix of luck and genius. He was fortunate to be one of the first people to learn about California’s gold reserves and he was smart enough to spot the even bigger opportunity of selling mining equipment. 

But if you look closer, you’ll see that Brannan also exploited four principles that we see utilized time and again during the stories of people who make it big.

2. Timing is everything, but don’t leave it to chance

The venture capitalist, Chris Paik, went viral on Twitter in 2021 after sharing the frameworks he uses to make investment decisions. 

One of the most important questions that Paik asks of each business opportunity is “Why now?” 

“The vast majority of capturable enterprise value happens right after a catalyzing moment,” Paik explains. “It’s why we haven’t seen a single new mobile social application since 2014, with the launch of Musical.ly (now TikTok). The “Why now?” that supported Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok was the distribution of cellular bandwidth speeds. Twitter came first, because it was initially only text, which has the lowest wireless packet size. Then came Instagram with images, Snapchat with images and video, and TikTok with video. That couldn’t have happened in any other order. If there were any other mobile media platforms, we would have seen them emerge in line with that spectrum of cellular bandwidth deployment.”

Any time there is a change in the environment—it could be a discovery, a crisis, a cultural shift, or a technological breakthrough—a window of opportunity opens and new possibilities emerge. If you spot one of these inflection points, you’re in a strong position to take advantage, especially if it’s a change that many others are not yet aware of. 

But the window doesn’t last long. As Paik thinks of it, “each time a new shift occurs, it is analogous to the formation of an unstable radioactive isotope. The radioactivity throws off a huge amount of energy in the form of capturable enterprise value, but is subject to half-life decay. Over time, the isotope decays and eventually becomes lead, at which point no new companies can generate enterprise value from the shift.” 

Paik offers another example in the form of Uber. While the release of the iPhone was essential for Uber’s existence, “the most important technological enabler for on-demand innovation was cellular networking speeds. The original iPhone was released using 2G/Edge, which was too slow to support real-time GPS and turn-by-turn directions. It wasn’t until the iPhone 3G that cellular bandwidth was capable of delivering these critical features. While the original iPhone was released in 2007, the iPhone 3G took another year, being released on July 11, 2008. Uber was founded nine months later.” 

Those who take advantage of these windows of opportunity seem lucky. How fortunate they were to have pursued that idea at that time, people say. But this is often backward. Many people succeed because they recognize a new inflection point and then are amongst the first to intentionally respond to it. 

There are all kinds of inflection points occurring all around us, all the time. The key is learning to recognize inflection points when they inevitably occur, as Brannan did, and, as Paik does, to evaluate whether or not an opportunity we are pursuing takes advantage of such a shift. 

But it is not enough to simply detect the presence of an inflection point, how you respond to it is crucial…

3. Pessimism is a great strategy for missing opportunity

After watching the first live national TV broadcast in 1951, Senator John F. Kennedy’s curiosity was piqued.

Recognizing the potential of this new medium, Kennedy became one of the first politicians to embrace television. 

In the early 1950s, he began appearing on talk shows, often giving stiff and awkward performances. 

However, with each appearance, Kennedy grew more comfortable, refining his TV persona. This newfound confidence led to his selection for the 1956 nomination speech for Adlai Stevenson at the Democratic convention, where his poised performance captured national attention and laid the foundation for his future presidential run.

Kennedy’s early adoption of television allowed him to run a presidential campaign in 1960 unlike the world had ever seen. He made frequent televised appearances, presenting himself as a charismatic and youthful candidate. 

By the time he faced off against Richard Nixon in the first-ever televised presidential debates, not only were there TV sets in 90% of American homes, but Kennedy’s mastery of the medium was evident. 

While Nixon appeared nervous and awkward, Kennedy was composed and confident. Almost a decade of TV experience paid off for Kennedy: viewers who watched the debate overwhelmingly feeling he had won, while radio listeners thought it was a draw. 

Many believe this stark contrast is what swung the election in Kennedy’s favor.

The crazy part is that almost anyone could see that TV represented a huge inflection point in the early 50s. But Kennedy was one of the few to actually embrace it. Political experts were too busy eyeing the medium with suspicion and pontificating about how damaging it would be for democracy. 

Even after becoming president, Kennedy’s advisors cautioned him against doing live TV appearances. They didn’t like how unpredictable it was. Kennedy, of course, ignored the advice, holding live press conferences every 16 days on average. 

Kennedy’s early commitment to TV proves that recognizing an inflection point isn’t enough; it requires the courage to engage with it, to be curious rather than fearful. A common response to an inflection point is pessimism—a surefire way to miss any associated opportunities. 

What did Samuel Brannan do when he learned about gold from his customers? He immediately went to see for himself. When you recognize a big shift, push yourself to learn more, test the waters, and start building familiarity so that you’re equipped to take advantage. 

Next, there is one essential question you must ask of any inflection point you notice… 

But first…

4. Working with a bias towards action is the ultimate competitive advantage

When you study the world’s most prolific creatives, athletes, business leaders, etc, you see the same pattern over and over again.

Working with a bias towards action is the ultimate competitive advantage.

That means always knowing your next move. And it means building a habit of turning your ideas and notes into action steps.

The Action Method product line, designed by a research team devoted to optimizing productivity, was made to optimize working with a bias towards action.

Each page includes a dedicated Action Zone that encourages you to stay action-oriented.

That means getting more done, seeing more results, and feeling more satisfaction.

You can pick up or replenish your supply here. 

5. Have the discipline to think through the implications

In 1994, Jeff Bezos quit his finance job and moved to Washington to start Amazon.com. 

It started, as always, with the recognition of an inflection point. 

“The wakeup call,” Bezos reveals, “was finding the startling statistic that web usage in the Spring of 1994 was growing at 2300% a year. You know, things just don’t grow that fast, it’s highly unusual. And that set me about thinking - what kind of business plan might make sense in the context of that growth?”

To answer that question, Bezos drafted a 30 page business plan during the car trip from the East coast to the West coast. 

“You know the business plan won’t survive its first encounter with reality,” Bezos admits, “but the discipline of writing the plan forces you to think through some of the issues and to get sort of mentally comfortable in the space. Then you start to understand… if you push on this knob, this will move over here, and so on.”

In other words, he was thinking through the implications of the internet’s inflection point. 

“I picked books as the first best product to sell online after making a list of like 20 different products that you might be able to sell,” Bezos explains, because “in the book space there are more than 3,000,000 different books worldwide active in print at any given time across all languages, more than 1,500,000 in English alone. So when you have that many items, you can literally build a store online that couldn’t exist any other way. And that’s important right now because the web is still in its infant technology. Basically, right now, if you can do things using more traditional methods, you probably should do them using the more traditional method.” 

Once you notice an inflection point, and you are willing to embrace it, it’s essential to take some quiet time to consider: what are the implications of this shift? 

For Bezos, he asked what it meant that everyone was moving online. 

Would they be willing to buy things online? Probably not, because the technology isn’t good enough. But are there some cases where buying online would be better than from a retail store? Yes, if you can supply more items than a retail store ever could. What category has more items in it than a retail store could ever stock? Books.

For Brannan, he asked what it meant that vast gold deposits had been discovered in California’s riverbeds. 

Most people haven’t realized there’s gold here. But eventually everyone is going to realize. At that point, thousands of Americans will flock to the area to take advantage. But they aren’t going to have any equipment. And I own the only store in the area. What if I stock up on equipment and sell it to them?

To sum up, taking advantage of the biggest opportunities typically requires three conditions:

1. The ability to recognize an inflection point when one occurs 

2. The willingness to respond to the inflection point with curiosity rather than fear 

3. The discipline to think through the implications of the inflection 

For our final snippet, we’ll learn how to increase the likelihood of being among the first to uncover an inflection point. 

We’ll leave you with this…

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