Stay Ahead of the Puck

Published: Jan. 13, 2022, 6 a.m.

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\\xa0Nobody predicted 2020 or what would happen in the world. As I take a step back, I notice things particularly in the working world. First, let me go back 20 years! I started my career in 2000 as an engineer for a large corporation. I had to wake up at 6am, get ready, and be in a cubicle by 8am. I would stay in my cubicle farm until 5pm and do it 5 days per week, 50 weeks per year. I had 2 weeks off, which I would typically reserve for the Christmas break. I would dream of owning my own business and not being stuck in this cubicle. That's when I saw the Amway business and jumped at the opportunity to earn my freedom from the corporate world. I learned about this new way of commerce called e-commerce and the Law of the Power Curve. This law plots all major technologies on X-Y axes of time and market penetration. Here's how it works. Any new technology has early adopters who try it out. It takes a long time for a new technology to gain momentum as it steadily climbs to 10% market penetration. In other words, 10% of the market has or is using this technology. This is called Critical Mass because it takes the same amount of time to get from 10 - 90% market penetration as it took to get from 0 - 10%. Then the curve levels off again as it takes just as long to get from 90 - 100% and in theory, never gets to 100%. The curve from start to finish looks like a "S", hence the name of S-Curve Economics. This was mind-blowing to me when I learned about it in 2002. I then studied the major technologies like the phonograph, the telephone, the TV, the PC, the internet, etc. They all followed this curve exactly, except for one difference. Each successive technology was building on the last, so the duration from 0 - 10% was getting shorter and shorter. This gave me the confidence that e-Commerce would be the next Power Curve even though I couldn't in my wildest dreams imagine a world where I would not be shopping in stores. I heard these visionary future thinkers that came to Amway events talking about this new thing called e-commerce. They said stuff like this. There's this new company called Amazon and they're losing a ton of money right now because they are spending way more than they are making to get people to shop there. I heard this. "In 10 years, people won't be shopping in malls or stores anymore. They'll be buying everything on the internet." This was preposterous. When you needed things, you go to a store for it. I went to the bank in person, the pharmacy for odds and ends, Walmart was huge. Auto parts store, electronic store, malls because they had tons of stores. You went to stores to get things you need. An entire industry had built around the need for people to go places in person for over 100 years. I believed the S-Curve would happen because history repeats and good technologies follows this curve. Therefore,\\xa0 I didn't totally reject the idea. I simply believed that internet shopping would increase and it would be good to own an e-Commerce site. That was what Amway was to me in 2002.\\xa0


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