land of opportunity

Opportunity is not obvious. It's not like looking through listings or opening a phonebook. It is not a straight path.

You find it, but it also finds you (with persistence).

I've tried a lot of things. Real estate agent. Working at startups. Service businesses. Short-term rentals. A variety of other dumb ideas.

I remember discovering Real Estate Twitter circa 2018 or so and watching people like Moses Kagan and Sean Sweeney building and renovating cool apartments. Richard Fertig creating Edgecamp. I remember discovering Isaac French building Live Oak Lake and a huge social following on top of it.

If only, I remember thinking.

I remember the first time I saw a talking head short-form video and thought — that's so cringy, I'll never do that.

Well. Here we are, scaling cringe mountain.

I am not any of those guys, but I have at least begun to see some success online and in building cool buildings.

It just took me a little while; I had to find mentors & partners (and prove myself worthy of them), and I had to do the same thing for an extended period rather than jumping at opportunities every year.

But I am very much doing today what I was fantasizing about not all that long ago. It's easy to take it for granted.

I was just in San Clemente, CA. It's the best, one of my favorite towns in the world. But it's fully developed. There are almost no empty lots. Development would be really hard here. Everything remotely close to the water is expensive.

If you look closely, you will see this is actually a double rainbow.

It would be easy to look around and say "there's no opportunity here, I'm priced out."

But all of those people, in all of those houses in San Clemente, buy stuff. And I have noticed that commercial lease space here seems relatively attainable compared to many other markets.

A fella I know, Jameson, left the tech & PE worlds to create a decking company in OC because everybody living in those houses wants to sit outside and enjoy the view. Their old decks rot; they want to build bigger, better ones. He saw a need. It wasn't easy, but he's figured it out. Deck boards > keyboards.

I was rocked by a video yesterday from Ben Wilson — someone I've been following for years.

By almost any measure, Ben has everything going for him. He is 36, has a successful history podcast that is his passion, he produced one of the biggest business podcasts in the world, an amazing network, a beautiful family, and four young kids.

But yesterday, in this 16 minute video, he announced a terminal cancer diagnosis. Aggressive and spread throughout his body. His doctors expect him to live about a year.

He talks candidly about life, death, work, and the people who had reached out to support him. He said he doesn't want to live like he's dying. He wants to live like he's living.

If you are healthy and living in the US today, you have such abundant opportunity. I actually think one of the major issues people face today is excessive optionality. We have too many choices and things we can do (The Paradox of Choice is a great book on this).

I firmly believe this is one of the greatest times in history to be a creative entrepreneurial person.

The interest-based social algorithms of today let you find an audience for almost anything you're interested in or good at, meet almost anyone you want to meet, and build almost any product you can imagine. This is a very recent phenomenon and was simply not the case for virtually all of human history.

You really can just do things.

That does not at all mean it's easy. It's never easy to find the recipe for what you can uniquely offer that the world also wants to buy.

But it's a noble pursuit, and if you are persistent and genuine, and can find great partners, it's amazing how much your life can change in a couple of years.

On this Independence Day — if you're healthy, have good people around you, and have the freedom to try something new or do something you already love — you hit the jackpot.

Celebrate that, and don't take it for granted.