was going to be a window of opportunity, just when lightning rods started to be publicly known and public feeling would run high, when a firm that had thought through the implications of the LRF office would be well positioned to pick up the ball and run with it.
Joe walked up and down his motel room. “Joe,” he said, “I really think you’re on to something.”
He walked up and down grinning and thinking Boy oh boy oh boy.
The beauty of it was, of course, that it would consolidate his position as a defender of family values. People would see that all he was trying to do was make the world a better place. Because whatever people may tell you, money isn’t the only thing in life. And the beauty of it was, no matter how you looked at it, he was going to make one heck of a lot of money.
He decided to call Domino’s to order in a pizza.
If you want to be a rich man, you need to be able to do two apparently contradictory things. On the one hand, you need to be able to operate at the level of people with a lot of money without losing your cool. Good restaurants, fine wines, fast cars—you need to be able to look like you take that for granted. But on the other hand, you can’t afford to get cut off from your roots. Because at the end of the day it’s ordinary people, with all their strengths and limitations, that wealth is based on. If you lose sight of that, you won’t have your money for long.
“You know what,” he said pacing up and down, waiting for the pizza to arrive. “I actually think this unexpected competition is a good thing. Because if this guy hadn’t come along I would probably have just gone along getting stuck in a rut, instead of opening up new markets. The way I look at it is, the guy has actually made me a present of two totally new markets that a guy like that is in no position to exploit.”
He walked over to the window and opened the curtain.
The motel had been built fairly recently by an exit off I-95. From where he stood, he could have been looking out on anywhere in the country. He could see a McDonalds, and a 7-Eleven, and a Waffle House, and a TCBY.
Every single one of those represented an idea that someone had had to have, an idea whose value had probably been far from obvious at the time. When did they actually start having 7-Elevens, anyway? At one time having a store that was open from 7 in the morning to 11 o’clock at night had been a real innovation, something no one had thought of before. People had probably said “Why would anyone pay those kind of prices at 11 p.m. when all they have to do is wait and go to the grocery store the next day? Or fine, maybe people might go if they’re desperate, but how’s a store supposed to survive on its takings between 7 and 9 a.m. and 6 and 11 at night?” Well, the answer is before you, buster.
Or take a Waffle House. Probably when someone came up with the idea everybody had scoffed and said nobody is going to want to eat waffles after 11 a.m. at the absolute latest, who ever heard of eating waffles throughout the day?
There’s nothing like the feeling that you’ve had an idea that everyone expected to fail, and gone and made a success of it. And yet it’s funny to think how big a part luck plays in these things.
If I hadn’t walked to the 7-Eleven that day and seen that heron, I might be selling vacuum cleaners to this very day, he thought.
“You’ve been lucky so far, Joe. You’ve already succeeded at what you set out to do. But don’t ever take that for granted. There’s bad luck as well as good in this world. You can’t afford to rest on your laurels.”
The sky was darkening, but it was not yet dark. In the west the molten gold of the setting sun slipped through the hills, and in the darkening hollow the yellow arches and the 7-Eleven and the Waffle House and the TCBY were glowing in the golden light. High above a flock of geese sped southward in a V formation, and on the highway the cars and trucks sped north and south.
He remembered standing on