“You should check out this Internet site I just discovered,” Mark told us all at some professional gathering I was attending. Everyone kind of shrugged it off. Most people there didn’t care much for Mark or his opinions, which he shared way too often. Plus, most websites seemed like novelties.
Mark was on to something, though. It was 1996. And the website was named after a famous South American rainforest/river.
Maybe it was my thinking how stupid it was to buy something off the Internet when I could go into Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, Walton Books at the mall, or Borders (if I was feeling really fancy) and browse through a bunch of physical publications with actual pages instead of jpeg files of covers by which to judge. But it was probably my opinion of Mark that kept me from checking it out and using it.
These days, I can’t imagine life without it—for books and a million other things, as it seems there’s an Amazon delivery truck at our house every day bringing yesterday’s purchases. But it wasn’t until the second decade of Y2K before I actually bought something from the Bezos billion-dollar buying site. Maybe not all because Mark endorsed it, but it certainly kept it out of my consideration. I missed out on deals, convenience, free shipping and lots of streaming stuff when I could’ve been all-in much earlier—perhaps finding it so impressive that I might’ve even invested in it in the late 90s. What a difference that would have made.
Something similar happened during my first couple of days in college, too. There was a guy named Bill, who like Mark, wasn’t fun to be around. But for some reason, he was always at our dorm room. We were talking about clubs and activities to join during that orientation week and Bill had a club in mind that sounded interesting to me.
Since it was on his radar, it wasn’t on mine—in fact, I made a point of completely avoiding that club. Little did I know, the people that were part of it would later become life-long friends of mine—something I didn’t discover until a year later when I circled back around and got involved only to realize they had the same opinion of Bill and he was never a part of their activities. That first year away at school was hard, and would’ve been so much better had I been able to connect sooner with the friends I would’ve made in that club.
With books and buddies, I regret the neglect by association that caused me to miss out on some really good things.
Lesson Learned: Just because somebody I don’t like or value their opinion likes something, suggestions something, is planning to do something, doesn’t mean I should write it off. Keeping an open mind to form my own opinion apart from the association is a much better approach.
Because as annoying as Elon Musk is, fast electric cars seem like a cool idea.
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