The Cost of Seeing Tomorrow Too Early

The Drive Home

Every now and then I'll spend a full day out at Circuit of the Americas just outside Austin. I always enjoy the time out there. Driving home afterward on TX-130, there's one building that's always caught my attention along the way. It's an Amazon warehouse. For years I looked at that place the same way I looked at every other warehouse along that stretch of highway, which is to say I hardly looked at it at all. It was just another big building beside the road.

I never gave a single thought to what was going on inside it. Then I read about Amazon's early years, and one small detail in that story changed the way I saw that building every time I drove past.

Back then, Amazon was still known mostly as the company that sold books online. Not much more than that. The dot com bubble had just burst, and internet companies everywhere were under enormous pressure to prove they could turn a profit. And yet here was Amazon, still spending billions building warehouses all over the place. If I'm being honest, I probably would've questioned that decision right along with everybody else. Some of those buildings looked far larger than the business could possibly need. Others looked only partly occupied.

From the outside, they looked like expensive decisions waiting for customers who hadn't shown up yet. The real argument was never about the warehouses, though. Underneath it, the argument was about whether the future Jeff Bezos believed in so strongly was ever actually going to arrive.

Seeing the Same Thing Differently

Back then, waiting a full week for something you'd ordered online didn't strike anyone as unusual. That's how buying something online worked. Nobody thought twice about it, because nobody expected anything different. Bezos wasn't building all those warehouses because people were asking him for faster shipping. He believed they eventually would want it. That's a different way of looking at a business than most people manage. Once two day delivery became the normal thing to expect, waiting a full week suddenly felt like an eternity. The buildings hadn't changed.

Neither had the roads that led to them. The only thing that changed was what people had come to expect.

After I read all that, the drive home from Austin started to look different. Every now and then somebody stops me after one of our events to tell me how much they enjoyed the stage. I always smile a little when they do, because I've learned they usually aren't talking about the stage at all. What they're really talking about is how the whole room felt that night, and the stage just happens to be the part they can point to.

I realized I'd been doing the same thing with those Amazon warehouses for years. I kept focusing on the building because it was the easy thing to see, even though the decision behind it was the real story.

Looking Again

These days, every time I drive that same stretch of TX-130, I still see the same warehouse sitting there beside the highway. Nothing about the building has changed since the last time I drove past. The thing that's changed is me. I don't see concrete walls and loading docks anymore when I look at it. I see a decision that looked completely unnecessary right up until the moment the rest of the world caught up to it.

I pay a lot more attention now to the ordinary things around me that might be in the middle of becoming something else. I've decided this is a real form of creativity in its own right. It doesn't always mean imagining some brand new thing nobody has ever imagined before. Sometimes it just means looking at the same thing everyone else is looking at, and being willing to recognize what it could still turn into. The warehouse never needed me to understand it. I just needed to catch up.