Years ago, I built a very popular website that showcased interesting locations in Google Earth. It took a lot of manual labor to find and categorize things, but it was a popular destination for a lot of users.
Could I do it again today? Not a chance.
First, technology is different. My manual labor of adding items to the database couldn’t be easily replicated in 2005. Today, that’s not a big advantage.
More importantly, Google Earth just isn’t as popular anymore. It’s still a great tool, but is roughly 10% as popular as it was in 2005. Here’s a chart from Google Trends that shows it:
This can happen in many areas of life, where you ignore the full set of circumstances that made something successful in the past, thinking you can still easily duplicate it today.
Warren Buffet put it this way, largely in reference to investing:
“The same mistake that a baseball manager would were he to judge the future prospects of a 42-year-old center fielder on the basis of his lifetime batting average.”
When I look at doing something that has worked well before, I try to think of reasons why it might not work as well today. Sometimes it can still work great, but sometimes the world has changed too much to allow it now.
Be willing to really look at the full circumstances for a past success, and dig deep into the “why it won’t work” ideas to help you avoid major pitfalls today.
