Category: Business Ideas

3 People with Apparently Nothing in Common

This post is part of User Generated Tuesdays. If you want to be read by 1,000 new friends please go here. This is written by Damon Zuman who writes lovely poems at his Peerpole blog.

Steve Jobs, Peyton Manning and Madonna…have nothing in common except insane wealth and celebrity status.

Nevertheless, for all of them to be so successful they must share something more. Something valuable, the rest of us mortals don’t have… The “Ring”? A Free Mason Membership? Dick Cheney’s Personal Diary? Nah, I think the answer is the ability to process the right information.

In the word of the infamous Gordon Gecko “The most valuable commodity I know of is information“. OK then, the key to success is knowledge. Yet few Jeopardy winners get more than 15 minutes or fame or $50,00 so there must be something else… Now more than ever, we are overwhelmed with information, much more than we can process. So filtering really becomes the key success factor: how familiar are you with your surrounding, how account are your senses? Basically, can you see what others can’t.

Any information can become a powerful leverage when it is relatively unknown and used with subtlety, think of insider trading tips :). So as a web entrepreneur, I may have to ask myself: How can I save money on advertising with word of mouth? Let’s study customers’ Myspace profiles. Am I using the right colors on my web page logos? Let’s consult color psychology articles. and etc… Overlooked details are a great source of competitive advantage especially in this Information Age.

In the end, whether it’s betting on new technology, reading a zone blitz or reinventing yourself for the 10th time, success usually comes down to minor details. Thanks to the Internet, never in the history of mankind has so much potentially overlooked information been available to so many…

“Yes, my friends. These are good times for entrepreneurs”