Seth's Blog - The Roush Effect

Gerald Roush, who recently died at the age of 68, was a long time Ferrari enthusiast. Nothing too interesting in that you might think, but as my big brother Seth Godin explains, this obsession led to a very nice little earner indeed, simply by compiling lists of information on Ferraris around the world and selling this info on a subscription basis to a few hundred people.

This is it, I feel. Find a tribe which has a passion for something, and provide everything that that group of individuals want to know about their passion (and sod the rest) and charge them a little bit of money for it...

....of course, it helps if you yourself have a passion for the same thing, and Roush's obssession started in his teens when these things tend to take root. But for those of us in our 20s, 30s, 40s and beyond, I don't for a minute believe all is lost. It's just a question of hitting on something that works; even in a small country like Estonia, we have the internet.

Or maybe you prefer giving a huge amount of your life that you'll never retrieve to employers who don't care if you live or die, performing a task that anyone else could do just as well, donating twenty something per cent of your hard earned money to incompetent Governments to piss up the wall (it's salutary to reflect that the Islamic faith demands as zakat, one of its five pillars, that an adherent  gives just 2.5 per cent of their income to the poor, not ten times that, and this for an unequivocally worthy cause) and having nothing to show for it at the end.

Anyway, it's a good post.