OPPORTUNITY CAFE

We all want opportunity.  In years past, opportunity was hard to come by.  Today, with the internet, opportunity is there for us.  To some degree, it may even assail us, with the seemingly endless promises of overnight wealth to be attained.

In his great work MacBeth, Shakespeare wrote: “Evil lures with trifles of truth.”  And so it does.   When someone buries a wee bit of truth within a proposition that may seem preposterous, but is yet something we would hope for, the tendency is to fixate on the bit of truth and assume that because we know that piece to be true, the remainder of the proposition must be true as well.

So it goes with the classic “get rich scheme.”

Consider this example:  In seeking out an internet opportunity, I came upon a website for sale.  Incredibly inexpensive relative to the returns it promised.  The website seller clearly told the truth about the size of the market for the product.  True, many people would want the product.  The website seller even had proof of how successful the website had been- statistical evidence provided by Google and Paypal of the number of site visitors and the number of purchases over the prior six months.  Clearly, the website made an incredible income for very little effort.  I nearly bought the site… but it just sounded “too good to be true.”  New to the internet market I set about studying the process.  Eventually I learned the omission that voided the proposition:  the seller had spent nearly all of his profits advertising to obtain the website traffic and sales.

There is true opportunity- even a WORLD OF OPPORTUNITY with the internet.  Still, evil lures with trifles of truth.  In seeking global economic opportunity, and in every aspect of life, we ought keep this in mind.