2.3.0. New Age comes with New Financial Shift
Whenever a new innovation comes into existence or a new era is born, there is often massive amount of financial fortunes to be made at the early phase. However, the unfortunate thing in human history is that only few people enjoy such financial fortunes.
For instance, when the First Industrial Revolution was born from the Agrarian Age, only a few people in Europe took advantage of the new financial opportunity. Such people included the George and Robert Stephenson family who founded Robert Stephenson and Company that built railway locomotives.
Others who reaped financial benefits from the locomotive invention of the First Industrial Revolution were Anne Leigh and, Ralph and Charles Brandling, who founded the Middleton Railway, which is the world's oldest continuously working railway, situated in the English city of Leeds.
In the Second Industrial Revolution, people that benefited financially were John D. Rockefeller who founded the Standard Oil company, which later gave birth to industry’s giants like Exxon, Mobil, Amoco, Chevron, ARCO, Conoco, and Sohio, Henry Ford who founded the Ford Motor Company, and Thomas Edison who founded the General Electric company.
In the Third Industrial Revolution, people who benefitted included Bill Gates who founded the Microsoft company, Steve Jobs who founded the Apple company, Jeff Bezos who founded the Amazon company, Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph who founded Netflix in 1997, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google in 1998 as internet search engines.
Those who joined by buying the shares of these companies or built businesses on top of these technologies, etcetera, also made tons of financial fortunes.
2.3.1. Why Many People Do Not Benefit Financially
You might be wondering why only a handful of people usually benefit from a financial opportunity that comes with an innovation?
The followings are the main reasons:
(1). Ignorance
Often, many people tend to get so busy with their jobs that they have little or no time to pay attention to new changes that occur around them. Hence, many people are ignorant of the birth of such new technology.
By the time they come to know about the changes, the innovation has entered its Fourth Phase (the Regulatory Phase), and huge financial gains would have been made by that time.
(2). Scepticism
When a new technology is born, many people are always sceptical about it. Why such scepticism?
Many people are too fearful and doubtful to take the risk. Those who take the calculated risk are the ones who enjoy the massive financial fortunes that come with early adoption.
Remember, without risk-taking, not much can be realised. For instance, those who jumped in when the internet was born in the Third Industrial Revolution took risks that many people wouldn’t dare. However, such risks paid off as they became dot-com millionaires.
Likewise, if you don’t want to take the risk now and invest in cryptocurrencies, but rather choose to wait and see how the industry unfolds, you may miss the large financial gains that go for early adopters.
(3). Lack of Business Skills
One injustice that has crept on humanity is the rise of a job. People go to school to be trained to look for and work in jobs. The entrepreneurial skills required to build successful businesses are suppressed and even killed by the job mentality.
The job mentality stifles the development and acquisition of business skills. That explains why an inventor of a technology might not benefit financially from his invention.
For instance, Matthew Murray of Holbeck was the man who built locomotive railways for Middleton Railway in 1812 during the First Industrial Revolution. Yet the people who made millions of pounds from the railway were the Anne Leigh, Ralph and Charles Brandling families and their associates. Matthew Murray only got marginal financial remuneration.
Why only marginal financial benefits for Murray? The answer is that he lacked the business sense required to build a company. He knew only his engineering skills, which were insufficient to build a successful business around his innovative idea.
However, consider Thomas Edison. He was a smart man not necessarily because he was a scientist who invented the electric lamp. Since he never knew much about business, he was smart enough to look for and team up with people that had the business as well as the technical skills he needed to build a successful company for his invention.
Note Thomas Edison’s team:
• J. P. Morgan – an American financier and banker who dominated corporate finance on Wall Street.
• Elihu Thomson – an English-born American engineer who was instrumental in the founding of major electrical companies in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France.
• Edwin James Houston – an electrical engineer, academician, businessman, inventor and writer.
• Charles Albert Coffin – a businessman who became the first President of General Electric corporation.
These four men formed a team with Thomas Edison to build General Electric corporation for Edison’s electric lamp invention.
If you are an inventor and do not have business skills, the best thing you should do for yourself is to form a team with those who have such business skills so that you do not lose out financially from your creative invention.
If you want to benefit from the ongoing sweeping changes in blockchain technology, you may not need to build a company from scratch, rather you can join and invest into blockchain companies and reap the financial fortunes of early crypto adopters.
In Summary
From this discussion, you can see why only few people are enjoying the financial fortunes that come with the birth of the ongoing digital revolution. You can choose to be among these few.