I don’t know if you realize this, but we live incredible times.
And by incredible I really mean “hard to believe”, “difficult to accept as being true”, etc.
I also don’t know what age you are right now, but I know I’ve been on Earth for more than 40 years. And somewhere around my twenties, something really spectacular started to happen.
A shift.
A slow movement, accelerating more and more, towards a new era of information.
We’re living that new era of information as we speak.
The Unending, Unbelievable Abundance Of Information
I’ve been raised in a world where I could hang out in libraries. Like real libraries, you know, with shelves and books on them. I’ve read many, many books there.
I’ve been raised in the world where there was no GPS: if you wanted to travel from one city to another, you had to rely on maps (most of the time printed on paper). I’ve traveled - and got lost - many times like that.
I’ve been raised in a world where videoconferencing was science-fiction. As a kid, I played thousands times imagining I am talking to somebody from the other side of the planet, just by holding a screen in my hand.
Well, today we live a world where the entire library from my hometown fits in my pocket. Like, literally, I have space for hundreds of thousands of books in my iPhone.
We live in a world where I can move freely anywhere, without getting lost, in any city and in any country, because I have a device talking directly with satellites. With satellites. A device in my pocket, talking with satellites.
And I can video call people not only from any part of the planet, but even people working in the space station, a tiny capsule orbiting somewhere around the Earth. And they can answer back, you know, they’re for real.
The Incessantly Rising Price Of Action
This introduction was merely meant as a background to what I want to write now: all this abundance of information made us lazy. That’s the truth, folks. It turned us into fearful, hesitant, undecided and careless people. We just don’t want to do something, because we either have so much information to consume, or because we feel completely paralyzed by this flood.
Or simply because we think we don’t have to anymore: our level of comfort and the richness of our lifestyle are simply unmatched in the entire known history of mankind.
And that, my friends, makes action, any type of action very precious. And very expensive, of course.
What Does That Mean For You, As An Entrepreneur?
Well, like I said, information is more and more accessible. That also makes it cheaper and cheaper.
But action, actually moving stuff from one place to another, or creating content, or products, or teams, or services, this is becoming increasingly hard to find. That also makes it more and more expensive.
You see where I’m heading now?
I hope you do.
Because, instead of complaining that we’re so crumbled and handicapped by this information flood, I see it in fact as a big, big opportunity. The opportunity to actually move stuff from one place to another, instead of just being hypnotized by the never ending falling of those green pixels on the screens that we’re glued to.
Of course it’s more comfortable to just enjoy this abundance of information and all the associated benefits.
But if you take action, any action, if you make a habit out of just doing stuff each and every day, you’ll be a few steps ahead. Always.
And those steps ahead can prove to be vital very soon.
This post is part of a 30 days challenge on business, you can find the entire list of articles here.
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running.