The Price of the Opportunity You Cannot See

Do you know the most important difference between the "entrepreneurs" of Twitter and those who truly know where the opportunity lies?

It is easy to blend in with the first group. Create a LinkedIn profile, make sure to connect with every venture capitalist you can meet, sip your specialty coffee and muse about whether Bitcoin will replace fiat currencies and whether Tesla is a bubble at its astronomical valuation. These people will adore you and follow your chirps wherever you tweet.

Now, look closely around you and you will recognize those who truly know. There are people who do not appear on LinkedIn networks, do not wander through entrepreneurship expos, and are not featured in Forbes headlines. They own pure business models built on competitive advantages and aimed at sustainable expansion. They possess technologies unknown to the market, deployed in sectors that do not yet acknowledge technology. They offer solutions to problems whose owners do not realize they face — and that they deserve better than what they have. They know crowded neighborhoods that represent major markets invisible to the radar of giant corporations. These are the ones who know where the opportunity lies.

These people are not born from nothing. Their wealth does not rain down from an inheritance, and they do not have a father ready to drown their commercial recklessness in capital to see in them a reflection of his own youth. They are around you today and have been from the start — moving the economy and creating tangible change. You only hear about them from Forbes covers after they have received their true recognition and the window for investing in what they built has closed. And I will tell you the fundamental difference: those who know where the opportunity lies know the price of that opportunity.

Behind every angry interaction between a customer and customer service, there lies a hidden question that both parties negotiate as if bargaining for the final answer: how much does it cost to lose this customer? Time is limited, and time is money. If you spend it endlessly on a single customer, you lose more on that customer than you gain from their satisfaction. Therefore, you must calculate the value of every customer before you engage in pleasing them, for in the end, pleasing everyone is an unattainable goal.

The customer warns threateningly: "If you lose me, I will never come back!" And depending on market fluctuations and supply and demand that day, the service provider may tremble at this threat or may respond dismissively with "provision comes from God." But have you ever thought about the true cost of losing these promised profits?

Let us take an example: if you are a bus driver carrying fifty passengers, you may — if God blesses your livelihood — face the dilemma of "Passenger 51." This passenger comes running to your bus, swearing they are willing to pay whatever it takes if you let them ride, unable to believe you cannot extend a hand to help when the fifty seats are already full.

An obvious question arises: your bus carries 50 seats and each seat costs you two riyals. What is the total cost of all seats? Did you answer "100 riyals"? Yes, that is clear — do not hesitate. But what would your seat cost be if you wanted to accept Passenger 51? Did you now answer "102 riyals"?

Forget that — the real question here is: why did you not welcome Passenger 51 and let them ride? Do you not realize the enormous difference between the cost of their ride and the profit they are offering you?!

The bus driver will answer that the question is obvious: yes, we all know that Passenger 51 is no different from the rest of the passengers except in their willingness to pay everything they own in cash for the ride. This means what you earn from them covers their cost many times over. But the problem preventing him from accepting their plea is capacity! The bus simply does not have a seat for Passenger 51.

Opportunities are neither created nor destroyed — they transform from one form to another! All you must do is seize the form that does not serve you, and convert it into one you can invest in.

I say to you: think again. Is this truly the reason for your refusal? Or is this simply the natural way we have grown accustomed to thinking — the lens through which we view the world of opportunities?

My friend, the bus driver — if what prevents you from accepting Passenger 51 is the capacity of your bus, then the opportunity is worth more than you can imagine: buy a new bus immediately! And if what prevents you from buying one is capital, I will provide you with every banking procedure you need to secure a loan that gives you what you dream of. Will you then realize what escaped your vision? Will you accept Passenger 51 now that you have every means to earn what they promised you?

The true answer here: you will not let them ride even if every means is available to you — and you would be right not to. Because you have now realized the true magnitude of the difference between the cost of Passenger 51 and the profit they offer: a catastrophic loss! While each regular passenger costs you two riyals and earns you the same, Passenger 51 will cost you hundreds of thousands of riyals in loans you took out to serve them with a bus that will carry only one profitable customer! Having this customer ride with you costs far more than any other customer: this is the cost of opportunity.

A simple economic concept: every opportunity has a price, and within every price lies an opportunity. If you choose to wait for it, you will wait a long time. Or see beyond what others see — for those who know opportunities know they have existed since ancient times, they do not emerge from nothing. And if you miss that, regret will not help.

Look again — you stand on the lands of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. A nation that compressed a century of development by the grace of God and then by the vision of the Founder, King Abdulaziz bin Abdulrahman Al Saud, may God have mercy on him. When he looked around, he did not wait for the golden opportunity to descend from the sky. He noticed that oil wells were scattered across Gulf nations but scarce in his homeland. He insisted on extracting oil as though he could see beneath the ground he walked on — an opportunity waiting for someone willing to dig for it.

You know that the well of prosperity was the seventh well. But what preceded it was not merely the drilling of six wells — it was years of massive accumulated costs and commercial contracts exhausted by wars between despair and hope. The price paid for drilling the desert was steep, but the King believed in a future where you and I can see the opportunity he saw within that price. And we have seen the day when the entire global energy market stood waiting for our nation to utter a single word to relieve its crises! The opportunity, as you can see, is precious — but within every price you pay, there is an opportunity.

I want you to remember this. As you browse energy prices today, remember that opportunity is exactly like energy: opportunities are neither created nor destroyed, they transform from one form to another! All you must do is seize the form that does not serve you and convert it into another form you can invest in.

Think about it — why exhaust yourself debating whether a currency like Bitcoin will replace the dollar or not? The opportunity is not in the value Bitcoin might reach. As long as this debate rages among people, its price will rise and fall. The opportunity here lies in the fact that it is a source of controversy whose waves can be ridden to wealth.

Reflect on the meaning of value, for if you understand it, you will understand much about the opportunities swirling around you. Value is not determined by the weight of a thing, nor by its attributes or utility, but by what people see in it. Is there anyone in the world today who does not pursue the dollar? And what is the dollar but a green piece of paper whose value amounts to nothing more than a false promise to exchange it for gold? Despite this, you remain fully prepared to trade everything you own for a sufficient quantity of these green papers.

Apply the same logic to Tesla, whose value exceeds that of the ten largest car companies in the world combined, placed side by side — even though Tesla's sales do not compare to a tenth of any one of them. Yet value, once again, is not in the utility of the thing, nor in the company's profits, but in what people see in it. Do you think the vast crowds who invested in Tesla appreciate that its precise price is calculated from the databases it built and the patents it acquired? The matter is simply that Tesla is a giant because people see it as one — and who are we to disagree?

After Amazon's IPO, the company found itself at the bottom of a pit of losses. Profits did not cover costs back then, but it did not leave the pit to bury its disappointment — it dug deeper! Amazon increased its spending year after year, and the pit grew larger each year than the one before, until it reached the pit — pardon me, the sixth year. You might have been less patient had you been among its owners back then, but they were fully prepared to buy the price of the opportunity they saw with everything they owned.

While observers watched the scoreboard — the gap between costs and profits — Amazon's owners were looking at the value of the opportunity that stood before them. Their wealth was multiplying even as the company absorbed losses year after year, and every dollar they spent on that company was worth multiples of its face value. And as you know from the Tesla story, value is not tied to a company's profits, because it is not a number like those profits — it is a gleam in the eyes of buyers. That gleam erupted in their seventh pit, and the oven has boiled over since that year until it carried Jeff Bezos to the summit of the world's wealthiest. Jeff knows, without a doubt, the price of opportunity.

The world we live in today is made of points of opportunity resembling oceans. Some see these oceans as impossibly distant, bordered by shores and covered by flags. Others see an ocean beneath the desert they stand on. You can stop here, at the threshold of this article, and continue your journey in life exactly as before — for we both know how steep it is to dig in a barren wasteland. And as you bury the pit that has accumulated your worries, or conceal an investment exhausted by debt, try to remember in general: the price of the opportunity that the eyes cannot see.