Max Klein

I’ve been noticing that a great deal of successful people are very consistent in what they do and in their approach. For example, a weather man. You will see him having weather kits, weather shows, etc. It’s all about the weather. That’s what people know him for. And he leverages his knowledge to move horizontally in the weather space.

In 2006 I took a holiday trip to Bali. I spent most of the days on the beach, sunning and body boarding. I had never body boarded before, but I loved that sensation of floating on the ocean on that small board. Till this one day, when I went a bit deep in the ocean. I went behind the waves, and I couldn’t get back.

I was out in the ocean on this small body board, not very far from the beach, but out of earshot. When I tried to paddle to the beach, the wave movements would push me backwards. No matter how hard I tried, I just could not make any progress forward. I was stuck.

The guy who had rented me the body board was a wiry dark Indonesian man with a charming smile and an engaging manner. He spoke excellent english, would always joke and smile with his customers.

Floating out there on the waves, I could see him. He was gesturing and laughing with a couple of foreign women. I lay there, calling out to them as they spoke, but my voice faded out before it reached them. The women gestured to him to come with them, and he started packing up his things to leave with them. Panic gripped me as I saw him pack up. I imagined myself stuck out here for days, having to eat small raw fish floating about to survive, till I myself got eaten by a bigger fish or shark, all within eyesight of the shore. Some type of perverse, comic food chain.

But then he counted his boards, and noticed one missing. He started looking around, and I raised my arm. He saw me, noticed my predicament, got on a board and got me out. He immediately proceeded to have a lot of jokes at my expense, which I thought was a bit cruel, seeing as I was just a few days away from being featured in the wacky and unusual deaths news section of a British tabloid.

I became great friends with that man, though. Over the next days, we proceeded to chat a bit, and I discovered that he was actually a gigolo. Like many of the other men on the Bali beach, he offered more than just body boarding, he offered his body too.

Very curious about all that, I asked him a great deal of questions. He spoke frankly, and told me a lot. He told me that he had earned more than $100,000 in the last few years. I was absolutely astounded, and proceeded to ask him the question: What are you going to do with all that money? He answered: I’m going to start a brothel. I spluttered : Why in heavens name don’t you start a motorcycle shop or something and make money legally?

He gave me an answer that is one of the most important sentences I have ever heard:

“What do I know about selling motorcycles? I know about selling bodies, that’s what I do, it’s what I’m good at, and I’m not going to throw away all I have learned over these years and do something where I have absolutely no experience.”

Nowadays, a few years later, in this internet business, I see people constantly making the mistake that that Indonesian gigolo would not make. They are jumping about and moving from one business to another. For example, you’d see someone who made a web app to teach languages suddenly show up with a web app for designers or so. That’s inconsistent. There is little overlap between the two areas – you can move the technical knowledge across, but the business knowledge does not apply.

Take people like George Soros. He does one thing. He’s about currency trading, and he’s really really good at it. You don’t see him suddenly going full scale into the real estate market, do you?

Knowledge is difficult to acquire mostly because it’s quite difficult to learn without experience. You can give a man a book on how to fish, and he will read it for years, but once he starts fishing, he will actually start learning how to fish. Nobody can read a book and immediately become a great fisher. You need experience in the area.

And when you spend time in one particular field, you gain valuable and critical experience that newbies coming in just don’t have. When you create a new business, you should not just throw all of that experience away and get started in something new – you should go on an offshoot of the business where you can transfer your knowledge over.

If you watch the TV show The Wire, you will remember the Stringer Bell, a successful drug dealer decided to take the drug money and go into real estate. He did, and all the people who KNEW real estate trounced him and took his money. Success in an area is not transferable. You need concrete domain knowledge. A successful drug dealer is not a successful real estate tycoon.

And a person successful in selling web apps or in selling drugs is not a successful mobile developer.