You heard the saying: Early bird catches the worm.

And you heard the words: First Mover Advantage.

You also saw the reality: First movers nearly never make it. They might get immortalized in a cool feature film documentary, but they rarely survive long enough even to realize that they were right — just too early.

Just go and watch General Magic.

That being said, the graveyard of any startup or corporate innovation community is littered with the corpses of those who were too late. Who launched just past the infliction point, when stuff gets “good enough.”

To build for and participate in the future, you must be in the arena. You need to experiment, learn, and think about what could be. You have to build muscle memory, gain an intuitive understanding of what is and will be.

It pays to be early. Just don’t bring the harvester out before you have even sowed the seeds.