First Mover Quotes

There must be must be a first mover existing above all – and this we call God.

Zeus, first cause, prime mover; for what thing without Zeus is done among mortals?

The existence of a prime mover- nothing can move itself; there must be a first mover. The first mover is called God.

Dearest creature in creation, Study English pronunciation. I will teach you in my verse Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse. I will keep you, Suzy, busy, Make your head with heat grow dizzy. Tear in eye, your dress will tear. So shall I! Oh hear my prayer. Just compare heart, beard, and heard, Dies and diet, lord and word, Sword and sward, retain and Britain. (Mind the latter, how it’s written.) Now I surely will not plague you With such words as plaque and ague. But be careful how you speak: Say break and steak, but bleak and streak; Cloven, oven, how and low, Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe. Hear me say, devoid of trickery, Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore, Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles, Exiles, similes, and reviles; Scholar, vicar, and cigar, Solar, mica, war and far; One, anemone, Balmoral, Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel; Gertrude, German, wind and mind, Scene, Melpomene, mankind. Billet does not rhyme with ballet, Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet. Blood and flood are not like food, Nor is mould like should and would. Viscous, viscount, load and broad, Toward, to forward, to reward. And your pronunciation’s OK When you correctly say croquet, Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve, Friend and fiend, alive and live. Ivy, privy, famous; clamour And enamour rhyme with hammer. River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb, Doll and roll and some and home. Stranger does not rhyme with anger, Neither does devour with clangour. Souls but foul, haunt but aunt, Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant, Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger, And then singer, ginger, linger, Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge, Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age. Query does not rhyme with very, Nor does fury sound like bury. Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth. Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath. Though the differences seem little, We say actual but victual. Refer does not rhyme with deafer. Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer. Mint, pint, senate and sedate; Dull, bull, and George ate late. Scenic, Arabic, Pacific, Science, conscience, scientific. Liberty, library, heave and heaven, Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven. We say hallowed, but allowed, People, leopard, towed, but vowed. Mark the differences, moreover, Between mover, cover, clover; Leeches, breeches, wise, precise, Chalice, but police and lice; Camel, constable, unstable, Principle, disciple, label. Petal, panel, and canal, Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal. Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair, Senator, spectator, mayor. Tour, but our and succour, four. Gas, alas, and Arkansas. Sea, idea, Korea, area, Psalm, Maria, but malaria. Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean. Doctrine, turpentine, marine. Compare alien with Italian, Dandelion and battalion. Sally with ally, yea, ye, Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key. Say aver, but ever, fever, Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver. Heron, granary, canary. Crevice and device and aerie. Face, but preface, not efface. Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass. Large, but target, gin, give, verging, Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging. Ear, but earn and wear and tear Do not rhyme with here but ere. Seven is right, but so is even, Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen, Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk, Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work. Pronunciation (think of Psyche!) Is a paling stout and spikey? Won’t it make you lose your wits, Writing groats and saying grits? It’s a dark abyss or tunnel: Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale, Islington and Isle of Wight, Housewife, verdict and indict. Finally, which rhymes with enough, Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough? Hiccough has the sound of cup. My advice is to give up!!!

Whoever is first to dominate the most important segment of a market with viral potential will be the last mover in the whole market.

Two adolescent girls on a hot summer night--hardly the material of great literature, which tends to endow all male experience (that of those twin brothers who found themselves adrift so many years ago in the dark northern woods for instance) with universal radiance. Faithless sons, wars and typhoons, fields of blood, greed and knives: our literature's full of such stories. And yet suppose for an instant that it wasn't the complacent father but his bored daughter who was the Prime Mover; suppose that what came first wasn't an appetite for drama but the urge to awaken it. Mightn't we then permit a single summer in the lives of two bored girls to represent an essential stage in the history of the universe?

Since everything that is moved functions as a sort of instrument of the first mover, if there was no first mover, then whatever things are in motion would be simply instruments. Of course, if an infinite series of movers and things moved were possible, with no first mover, then the whole infinity of movers

There’s barely a product or service on the market today that customers can’t buy from someone else for about the same price, about the same quality, about the same level of service and about the same features. If you truly have a first-mover’s advantage, it’s probably lost in a matter of months. If you offer something truly novel, someone else will soon come up with something similar and maybe even better. But if you ask most businesses why their customers are their customers, most will tell you it’s because of superior quality, features, price or service. In other words, most companies have no clue why their customers are their customers. This is a fascinating realization.

Therefore, there must be a first mover existing above all—and this we call God.

being the first mover doesn’t do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you. It

You’ve probably heard about “first mover advantage”: if you’re the first entrant into a market, you can capture significant market share while competitors scramble to get started. But moving first is a tactic, not a goal. What really matters is generating cash flows in the future, so being the first mover doesn’t do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you. It’s much better to be the last mover—that is, to make the last great development in a specific market and enjoy years or even decades of monopoly profits. The way to do that is to dominate a small niche and scale up from there, toward your ambitious long-term vision. In this one particular at least, business is like chess. Grandmaster José Raúl Capablanca put it well: to succeed, “you must study the endgame before everything else.

They forget to mention that he is the slowest mover in the universe; that his Eye that never sleeps, might as well, since it takes it a century to see what any other eye would see in a week; that in all history there is not an instance where he thought of a noble deed first, but always thought of it just a little after somebody else had thought of it and done it. He arrives then, and annexes the dividend.

My dear, the universe runs itself, and the eternal laws inherent in Nature suffice, without any first cause or prime mover, to produce all there is and all that we know; the perpetual movement of matter explains everything: why need we supply a motor to that which is ever in motion? The universe is an assemblage of unlike entities which act and react mutually and successively with and against each other; I discern no start, no finish, no fixed boundaries, this universe I see only as an incessant passing from one state into another, and within it only particular beings which forever change shape and form, but I acknowledge no universal cause behind and distinct from the universe and which gives it existence and which procures the modifications in the particular beings composing it.

To recognize someone, you had to first know them.

One of the obvious implications of a potential intelligence explosion is that there would be an overwhelming first-mover advantage. In other words, whoever gets there first will be effectively uncatchable.

From my college courses and my reading I knew the various names that came at the end of a line of questions or were placed as periods to bafflement: the First Cause, the First Mover, the Life Force, the Universal Mind, the First Principle, the Unmoved Mover, even Providence. I too had used those names in arguing with others, and with myself, trying to explain the world to myself. And now I saw that those names explained nothing. They were of no more use than Evolution or Natural Selection or Nature or The Big Bang of these later days. All such names do is catch us within the length and breadth of our own thoughts and our own bewilderment. Though I knew the temptation of simple reason, to know nothing that can't be proved, still I supposed that those were not the right names. I imagined that the right name might be Father, and I imagined all that that name would imply: the love, the compassion, the taking offense, the disappointment, the anger, the bearing of wounds, the weeping of tears, the forgiveness, the suffering unto death. If love could force my own thoughts over the edge of the world and out of time, then could I not see how even divine omnipotence might by the force of its own love be swayed down into the world? Could I not see how it might, because it could know its creatures only by compassion, put on mortal flesh, become a man, and walk among us, assume our nature and our fate, suffer our faults and our death? Yes. I could imagine a Father who is yet like a mother hen spreading her wings before the storm or in the dusk before the dark night for the little ones of Port William to come in under, some of whom do, and some do not. I could imagine Port William riding its humble wave through time under the sky, its little flames of wakefulness lighting and going out, its lives passing through birth, pleasure, sufferning, and death. I could imagine God looking down upon it, its lives living by His spirit, breathing by His breath, knowing by His light, but each life living also (inescapably) by its own will--His own body given to be broken.

I read the passage Owen had underlined most fervently in his copy of St. Thomas Aquinas—“ Demonstration of God’s Existence from Motion.” I read the passage over and over, sitting on Owen Meany’s bed. Since everything that is moved functions as a sort of instrument of the first mover, if there was no first mover, then whatever things are in motion would be simply instruments. Of course, if an infinite series of movers and things moved were possible, with no first mover, then the whole infinity of movers and things moved would be instruments. Now, it is ridiculous, even to unlearned people, to suppose that instruments are moved but not by any principal agent. For, this would be like supposing that the construction of a box or bed could be accomplished by putting a saw or a hatchet to work without any carpenter to use them. Therefore, there must be a first mover existing above all—and this we call God.

But the acknowledging of one God, eternal, infinite, and omnipotent, may more easily be derived, from the desire men have to know the causes of natural bodies, and their several virtues, and operations; than from the fear of what was to befall them in time to come. For he that from any effect he seeth come to pass, should reason to the next and immediate cause thereof, and from thence to the cause of that cause, and plunge himself profoundly in the pursuit of causes; shall at last come to this, that there must be, as even the heathen philosophers confessed, one first mover; that is, a first, and an eternal cause of all things; which is that which men mean by the name of God: and all this without thought of their fortune; the solicitude whereof, both inclines to fear, and hinders them from the search of the causes of other things; and thereby gives occasion of feigning of as many gods, as there be men that feign them.

Dawkins, as I have said, tells us that there is “absolutely no reason” to think that the Unmoved Mover, First Cause, etc. is omnipotent, omniscient, good, and so forth. Perhaps what he meant to say was “absolutely no reason, apart from the many thousands of pages of detailed philosophical argumentation for this conclusion that have been produced over the centuries by thinkers of genius, and which I am not going to bother trying to answer.” So, a slip of the pen, perhaps.

Futurists are skilled at listening to and interpreting the signals talking. It’s a learnable skill, and a process anyone can master. Futurists look for early patterns—pre-trends, if you will—as the scattered points on the fringe converge and begin moving toward the mainstream. They know most patterns will come to nothing, and so they watch and wait and test the patterns to find those few that will evolve into genuine trends. Each trend is a looking glass into the future, a way to see over time’s horizon. The advantage of forecasting the future in this way is obvious. Organizations that can see trends early enough to take action have first-mover influence. But they can also help to inform and shape the broader context, conversing and collaborating with those in other fields to plan ahead.

How will you know if your pollinator population isn't up to par? If you find cucumbers fat at one end and skinny at the other, baby summer squash that are rotting at the blossom end, blackberries with only a few plump lobes, or lop-sided apples with a big side and a little side, your garden isn't seeing proper pollination. In some cases, inadequate pollination can be due to bad weather during bloom time, but if you notice problems, your first step should be to ensure that you're providing the proper habitat for wild pollen movers. (There's not much you can do about a cold spring.)

The principal reason for this limited mastery of materials was the energy constraint: for millennia our abilities to extract, process, and transport biomaterials and minerals were limited by the capacities of animate prime movers (human and animal muscles) aided by simple mechanical devices and by only slowly improving capabilities of the three ancient mechanical prime movers: sails, water wheels, and wind mills. Only the conversion of the chemical energy in fossil fuels to the inexpensive and universally deployable kinetic energy of mechanical prime movers (first by external combustion of coal to power steam engines, later by internal combustion of liquids and gases to energize gasoline and Diesel engines and, later still, gas turbines) brought a fundamental change and ushered in the second, rapidly ascending, phase of material consumption, an era further accelerated by generation of electricity and by the rise of commercial chemical syntheses producing an enormous variety of compounds ranging from fertilizers to plastics and drugs.

only One True God can provide an adequate religious basis for the moral order. Divine essences such as the Tao do not command us to love one another. The “first mover” does not forbid us to covet another’s spouse. Paul Tillich’s conception of God as the “ground of our being” is not a being and therefore is incapable of having, let alone expressing, moral concerns. As for the little “beings” who populate pagan pantheons, they seem to concern themselves only with their own welfare and to ignore what people do to and for one another. Only monotheism serves as a basis for morality, for compelling and significant “thou shalts” and “thou shalt nots.” This certainly is not to suggest that pagan societies lack morality, but to acknowledge that their moral orders are not justified on religious grounds.

the so-called first-mover advantage is usually not an advantage. Industry pioneers often end up with arrows in their backs—while the horsemen, arriving later (Facebook after Myspace, Apple after the first PC builders, Google after the early search engines, Amazon after the first online retailers), get to feed off the carcasses of their predecessors by learning from their mistakes, buying their assets, and taking their customers.

I read the passage Owen had underlined most fervently in his copy of St. Thomas Aquinas—“Demonstration of God’s Existence from Motion.” I read the passage over and over, sitting on Owen Meany’s bed. Since everything that is moved functions as a sort of instrument of the first mover, if there was no first mover, then whatever things are in motion would be simply instruments. Of course, if an infinite series of movers and things moved were possible, with no first mover, then the whole infinity of movers and things moved would be instruments. Now, it is ridiculous, even to unlearned people, to suppose that instruments are moved but not by any principal agent. For, this would be like supposing that the construction of a box or bed could be accomplished by putting a saw or a hatchet to work without any carpenter to use them. Therefore, there must be a first mover existing above all—and this we call God.

As the move went on, the woman slowed down. At first, she had borne down on the emergency with focus and energy, almost running through the house with one hand grabbing something and the other holding up the phone. Now she was wandering through the halls aimlessly, almost drunkenly. Her face had that look. The movers and the deputies knew it well. It was the look of someone realizing that her family would be homeless in a matter of hours. It was something like denial giving way to the surrealism of the scene: the speed and violence of it all; sheriffs leaning against your wall, hands resting on holsters; all these strangers, these sweating men, piling your things outside, drinking water from your sink poured into your cups, using your bathroom. It was the look of being undone by a wave of questions. What do I need for tonight, for this week? Who should I call? Where is the medication? Where will we go? It was the face of a mother who climbs out of the cellar to find the tornado has leveled the house.

I wish I had asked myself when I was younger. My path was so tracked that in my 8th-grade yearbook, one of my friends predicted— accurately— that four years later I would enter Stanford as a sophomore. And after a conventionally successful undergraduate career, I enrolled at Stanford Law School, where I competed even harder for the standard badges of success. The highest prize in a law student’s world is unambiguous: out of tens of thousands of graduates each year, only a few dozen get a Supreme Court clerkship. After clerking on a federal appeals court for a year, I was invited to interview for clerkships with Justices Kennedy and Scalia. My meetings with the Justices went well. I was so close to winning this last competition. If only I got the clerkship, I thought, I would be set for life. But I didn’t. At the time, I was devastated. In 2004, after I had built and sold PayPal, I ran into an old friend from law school who had helped me prepare my failed clerkship applications. We hadn’t spoken in nearly a decade. His first question wasn’t “How are you doing?” or “Can you believe it’s been so long?” Instead, he grinned and asked: “So, Peter, aren’t you glad you didn’t get that clerkship?” With the benefit of hindsight, we both knew that winning that ultimate competition would have changed my life for the worse. Had I actually clerked on the Supreme Court, I probably would have spent my entire career taking depositions or drafting other people’s business deals instead of creating anything new. It’s hard to say how much would be different, but the opportunity costs were enormous. All Rhodes Scholars had a great future in their past. the best paths are new and untried. will this business still be around a decade from now? business is like chess. Grandmaster José Raúl Capablanca put it well: to succeed, “you must study the endgame before everything else. The few who knew what might be learned, Foolish enough to put their whole heart on show, And reveal their feelings to the crowd below, Mankind has always crucified and burned. Above all, don’t overestimate your own power as an individual. Founders are important not because they are the only ones whose work has value, but rather because a great founder can bring out the best work from everybody at his company. That we need individual founders in all their peculiarity does not mean that we are called to worship Ayn Randian “prime movers” who claim to be independent of everybody around them. In this respect, Rand was a merely half-great writer: her villains were real, but her heroes were fake. There is no Galt’s Gulch. There is no secession from society. To believe yourself invested with divine self-sufficiency is not the mark of a strong individual, but of a person who has mistaken the crowd’s worship—or jeering—for the truth. The single greatest danger for a founder is to become so certain of his own myth that he loses his mind. But an equally insidious danger for every business is to lose all sense of myth and mistake disenchantment for wisdom.

There’s barely a product or service on the market today that customers can’t buy from someone else for about the same price, about the same quality, about the same level of service and about the same features. If you truly have a first-mover’s advantage, it’s probably lost in a matter of months. If you offer something truly novel, someone else will soon come up with something similar and maybe even better. But if you ask most businesses why their customers are their customers, most will tell you it’s because of superior quality, features, price or service. In other words, most companies have no clue why their customers are their customers.

First of all, let us not all be too glib in our statements about the will of God. God’s will is a profound and holy mystery, and the fact that we live our everyday lives engulfed in this mystery should not lead us to underestimate its holiness. We dwell in the will of God as in a sanctuary. His will is the cloud of darkness that surrounds His immediate presence. It is the mystery in which His divine life and our created life become “one spirit,” since, as St. Paul says, “Those who are joined to the Lord are one spirit” (I Corinthians 6: 17). There are religious men who have become so familiar with the concept of God’s will that their familiarity has bred an apparent contempt. It has made them forget that God’s will is more than a concept. It is a terrible and transcendent reality, a secret power which is given to us, from moment to moment, to be the life of our life and the soul of our own soul’s life. It is the living flame of God’s own Spirit, in Whom our own soul’s flame can play, if it wills, like a mysterious angel. God’s will is not an abstraction, not a machine, not an esoteric system. It is a living concrete reality in the lives of men, and our souls are created to burn as flames within His flame. The will of the Lord is not a static center drawing our souls blindly toward itself. It is a creative power, working everywhere, giving life and being and direction to all things, and above all forming and creating, in the midst of an old creation, a whole new world which is called the Kingdom of God. What we call the “will of God” is the movement of His love and wisdom, ordering and governing all free and necessary agents, moving movers and causing causes driving drivers and ruling those who rule, so that even those who resist Him carry out His will without realizing that they are doing so In all His acts God orders all things whether good or evil for the good of those who know Him and seek Him and who strive to bring their own freedom under obedience to His divine purpose All that is done by the will of God in secret is done for His glory and for the good of those whom He has chosen to share in His glory!

I said, “Sounds good,” and set my alarm to eight o’clock, thinking that, statistically, I would be fine. Floof woke me up with her barking at seven o’clock when the movers arrived. After the men had been unpacking their truck for a while, I felt weird standing around not helping them so I decided to make small talk. “How much more stuff do you guys have?” I asked one of the movers. “All that’s left is the couch and the armchair,” he said. “And my mattress, right?” I asked. The man looked puzzled. “Uh . . . no. There’s no mattress in the truck.” These same movers had carted my bed away less than a week before. They’d brought in and put together my bed frame, but somehow they didn’t think it was strange that there wasn’t anything to put on top of it.

On the first day I walked into Simon’s bustling headquarters, just across from City Hall, I encountered an intense young fund-raiser sitting in an open cubicle, working his quarry over the phone. Curious, I stopped to watch the spectacle. “Five hundred bucks? Five hundred bucks! You know what you’re telling me? You don’t give a shit about Israel,” the intense, wiry young man shouted at God knows which mover and shaker on the other end of the line. “I’d be embarrassed for you to take your five hundred bucks.” The kid hung up and stared at the phone, which rang an instant later. “Yeah, that’s better,” he said, in a markedly calmer tone. “Thanks.” Even at twenty-four, Rahm Emanuel had a gift for getting his point across, a quality I would see on display many times as we teamed up in the decades to come.

a young Goldman Sachs banker named Joseph Park was sitting in his apartment, frustrated at the effort required to get access to entertainment. Why should he trek all the way to Blockbuster to rent a movie? He should just be able to open a website, pick out a movie, and have it delivered to his door. Despite raising around $250 million, Kozmo, the company Park founded, went bankrupt in 2001. His biggest mistake was making a brash promise for one-hour delivery of virtually anything, and investing in building national operations to support growth that never happened. One study of over three thousand startups indicates that roughly three out of every four fail because of premature scaling—making investments that the market isn’t yet ready to support. Had Park proceeded more slowly, he might have noticed that with the current technology available, one-hour delivery was an impractical and low-margin business. There was, however, a tremendous demand for online movie rentals. Netflix was just then getting off the ground, and Kozmo might have been able to compete in the area of mail-order rentals and then online movie streaming. Later, he might have been able to capitalize on technological changes that made it possible for Instacart to build a logistics operation that made one-hour grocery delivery scalable and profitable. Since the market is more defined when settlers enter, they can focus on providing superior quality instead of deliberating about what to offer in the first place. “Wouldn’t you rather be second or third and see how the guy in first did, and then . . . improve it?” Malcolm Gladwell asked in an interview. “When ideas get really complicated, and when the world gets complicated, it’s foolish to think the person who’s first can work it all out,” Gladwell remarked. “Most good things, it takes a long time to figure them out.”* Second, there’s reason to believe that the kinds of people who choose to be late movers may be better suited to succeed. Risk seekers are drawn to being first, and they’re prone to making impulsive decisions. Meanwhile, more risk-averse entrepreneurs watch from the sidelines, waiting for the right opportunity and balancing their risk portfolios before entering. In a study of software startups, strategy researchers Elizabeth Pontikes and William Barnett find that when entrepreneurs rush to follow the crowd into hyped markets, their startups are less likely to survive and grow. When entrepreneurs wait for the market to cool down, they have higher odds of success: “Nonconformists . . . that buck the trend are most likely to stay in the market, receive funding, and ultimately go public.” Third, along with being less recklessly ambitious, settlers can improve upon competitors’ technology to make products better. When you’re the first to market, you have to make all the mistakes yourself. Meanwhile, settlers can watch and learn from your errors. “Moving first is a tactic, not a goal,” Peter Thiel writes in Zero to One; “being the first mover doesn’t do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you.” Fourth, whereas pioneers tend to get stuck in their early offerings, settlers can observe market changes and shifting consumer tastes and adjust accordingly. In a study of the U.S. automobile industry over nearly a century, pioneers had lower survival rates because they struggled to establish legitimacy, developed routines that didn’t fit the market, and became obsolete as consumer needs clarified. Settlers also have the luxury of waiting for the market to be ready. When Warby Parker launched, e-commerce companies had been thriving for more than a decade, though other companies had tried selling glasses online with little success. “There’s no way it would have worked before,” Neil Blumenthal tells me. “We had to wait for Amazon, Zappos, and Blue Nile to get people comfortable buying products they typically wouldn’t order online.

Size Matters. A lot. How much you have and more importantly how much space it will take up in a movingtruck are the first things you need to know when planning a long distance move. Professional movers charge by weight because it is an easier and more uniform way to determine exactly how much you have. They literally drive the truck onto a large scale before loading your goods to get a light weight and return after loading your stuff to get a heavy weight, with the difference being the weight of your shipment. The moving company’s estimate, however, is based on coming to your home and surveying the total cubic feet, or estimated size of all your household goods. They then convert that figure into a weight estimate by multiplying the cubic feet (cubes) by the average density of 6.5 pounds per cubic foot. A small 2-bedroom house for example might have 1,000 cubic feet which when multiplied by a density of 6.5 (lbs) would equal 6,500 lbs. If this sounds like brain surgery then I would ask you to try and remember the last furniture mover you met who struck you as brain surgeon-ish.

Negative images of emigration were transformed into positive ones, not by Wakefield in 1830, but by a much broader trans-Atlantic ideological transition around 1815. Its semiotic shape was the partial displacement of the word “emigrant” by more positively loaded words. According to David Hackett Fischer and James C. Kelly, “before 1790, Americans thought of themselves as emigrants, not immigrants. The word immigrant was an Americanism probably invented in that year. It had entered common usage by 1820.” Related terms also emerged in the 1810s. “Pioneer in the western sense first appeared in 1817”; “Words such as mover (1810), moving wagons (1817), relocate (1814), even the verb to move in its present migratory sense, date from this period.” This was indeed a “radical transformation . . . a new language of migration.”72 But Fischer and Kelly fail to note that it was not solely American and that settler, not immigrant or pioneer, was its main manifestation. In Britain, settler was used in its current meaning at least as far back as the seventeenth century, but it was used infre- quently. By the early nineteenth century, it had connotations of a higher status than “emigrant.” Settlers were distinct from sojourners, slaves, or convict emigrants, and initially even from lower-class free emigrants. In Australia, “‘Settlers’ were men of capital and, in the 1820s, regarded as the true colonists, to be distinguished from mere laboring ‘immigrant’ . . . though eventually all Australia’s immigrants were termed ‘settlers.

A mover started in on a girl’s bedroom, painted pink with a sign on the door announcing THE PRINCESS SLEEPS HERE. Another took on the disheveled office, packing Resumes for Dummies into a box with a chalkboard counting down the remaining days of school. The eldest child, a seventh-grade boy, tried to help by taking out the trash. His younger sister, the princess, held her two-year-old sister’s hand on the porch. Upstairs, the movers were trying not to step on the toddler’s toys, which when kicked would protest with beeping sounds and flashing lights. As the move went on, the woman slowed down. At first, she had borne down on the emergency with focus and energy, almost running through the house with one hand grabbing something and the other holding up the phone. Now she was wandering through the halls aimlessly, almost drunkenly. Her face had that look. The movers and the deputies knew it well. It was the look of someone realizing that her family would be homeless in a matter of hours. It was something like denial giving way to the surrealism of the scene: the speed and violence of it all; sheriffs leaning against your wall, hands resting on holsters; all these strangers, these sweating men, piling your things outside, drinking water from your sink poured into your cups, using your bathroom. It was the look of being undone by a wave of questions. What do I need for tonight, for this week? Who should I call? Where is the medication? Where will we go? It was the face of a mother who climbs out of the cellar to find the tornado has leveled the house.

The first mover is the mind. - Master Wei Priest of the K’un Lun

What is one of the best or most worthwhile investments you’ve ever made? Investing in Cobra back in the early ’90s. My $ 1.8 million investment earned me $ 40 million after the company was bought by Acushnet. I rolled that money back into my business. The decision was a no-brainer for three reasons: My investment got me 12 percent of Cobra and the allocation of my investment was put to R& D. During this era, Callaway was the first to go to market with an oversize driver but neglected to follow up on oversize irons. We/ Cobra decided to attack this virgin market immediately by producing oversize irons for men and women, and we catered for the senior player, which had been left neglected. This decision was a solid rocket booster for Cobra’s massive growth in the marketplace. I was to remain an endorsed player representing Cobra for years to come, receiving an annual payment that would quickly recoup my initial investment. So, my ROI was always guaranteed, leaving me with 12 percent of a company that had hyper growth. I was the #1 player in the world during these halcyon times—a global player. So, fortunately for us, I was a needle-mover in regards to exposure in a sport that was booming in the ’80s, hence product promotion and awareness.

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In a classic study, marketing researchers Peter Golder and Gerard Tellis compared the success of companies that were either pioneers or settlers. The pioneers were first movers: the initial company to develop or sell a product. The settlers were slower to launch, waiting until the pioneers had created a market before entering it. When Golder and Tellis analyzed hundreds of brands in three dozen different product categories, they found a staggering difference in failure rates: 47 percent for pioneers, compared with just 8 percent for settlers. Pioneers were about six times more likely to fail than settlers. Even when the pioneers did survive, they only captured an average of 10 percent of the market, compared with 28 percent for settlers.

case of Adam, however, had no analogy with this, but was altogether different. For, having been beguiled by another under the pretext of immortality, he is immediately seized with terror, and hides himself; not as if he were able to escape from God; but, in a state of confusion at having transgressed His command, he feels unworthy to appear before and to hold converse with God. Now, “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom;” the sense of sin leads to repentance, and God bestows His compassion upon those who are penitent. For [Adam] showed his repentance by his conduct, through means of the girdle [which he used], covering himself with fig-leaves, while there were many other leaves, which would have irritated his body in a less degree. He, however, adopted a dress conformable to his disobedience, being awed by the fear of God; and resisting the erring, the lustful propensity of his flesh (since he had lost his natural disposition and child-like mind, and had come to the knowledge of evil things), he girded a bridle of continence upon himself and his wife, fearing God, and waiting for His coming, and indicating, as it were, some such thing [as follows]: Inasmuch as, he says, I have by disobedience lost that robe of sanctity which I had from the Spirit, I do now also acknowledge that I am deserving of a covering of this nature, which affords no gratification, but which gnaws and frets the body. And he would no doubt have retained this clothing for ever, thus humbling himself, if God, who is merciful, had not clothed them with tunics of skins instead of fig-leaves. For this purpose, too, He interrogates them, that the blame might light upon the woman; and again, He interrogates her, that she might convey the blame to the serpent. For she related what had occurred. “The serpent,” says she, “beguiled me, and I did eat.” But He put no question to the serpent; for He knew that he had been the prime mover in the guilty deed; but He pronounced the curse upon him in the first instance, that it might fall upon man with a mitigated rebuke. For God detested him who had led man astray, but by degrees, and little by little, He showed compassion to him who had been beguiled.

To assert a belief in free will is to accept responsibility for our actions and to recognize the mind as “more or less a first cause, an unmoved mover,” as the theorist Thomas Clark says: it is to hold the view that “we could have willed otherwise in the radical sense that the will is not the explicable or predictable result of any set of conditions that held at the moment of choice.

: Every single thing must be moved by something else, but at some point there had to be an original First Mover, or God). Every migration story starts with person one leaving a place for another place. That person in the village was Great-Grandfather Tong Zhenyong.

First-mover advantages tend to prevail when patented technology is involved, or when there are strong network effects (the product or service becomes more valuable when there are a greater number of users, as with telephones or social media).

I should go out on the radio with it. Must be a slow day for the media—getting more what’s-happening calls from reporters than I am getting service calls from citizens. They all want to do something on the first one, the actress on Mulholland. You know, a death-of-a-Hollywood-dream story. And they’d probably jump all over this latest call, too.” “Yeah, what is it?” “A citizen up in Laurel Canyon. On Wonderland. He just called up and said his dog came back from a run in the woods with a bone in its mouth. The guy says it’s human—an arm bone from a kid.” Bosch almost groaned. There were four or five call outs like this a year. Hysteria always followed by simple explanation: animal bones. Through the windshield he saluted the two body movers from the coroner’s office as they headed to the front doors of the van. “I know what you’re thinking, Harry. Not another bone run. You’ve done it a hundred times and it’s always the same thing. Coyote, deer, whatever. But listen, this guy with the dog, he’s an MD. And he says there’s no doubt. It’s a humerus. That’s the upper arm bone.

Rudolf Diesel deliberately set out to design a new, more efficient, prime mover, and by 1897 his first (heavy and stationary) engine had reached an efficiency of 30 percent, double the performance of the best steam engines.[40] But the first marine engine was installed only in 1912 on Christian X, a Danish freighter. Diesel-powered ships carried much less fuel than coal-fired steamers, but could travel further without refueling because the new engines were nearly twice as efficient—and because, per unit of mass, diesel oil contains nearly twice as much energy. An

Timing and execution made all the difference. We earned most of our money on the first one hundred stations we bought—numbers 20 to 118. Why? Because after that the rest of the industry caught on, competition for stations increased, and prices went up. However, we continued to acquire even then, albeit at a slower rate, because of the economies of eliminating redundancies within a large portfolio in geographic concentrations and because our average price per station remained so low. But it was the first-mover advantage that made Jacor a lead dog—and a home run. Within three years, we went from 20 stations to 243. Jacor

It’s tough enough to sell a product or service to someone who has an immediate need. Selling a future need usually causes the early pioneers to get a lot of arrows shot at them. The battlefield of business is filled with the dead bodies of first movers.

There is a powerful first-mover advantage in framing. Whenever possible, seek to control the frame of the negotiation at the start.

Research on launching new businesses and products shows that—at best—the so-called first-mover advantage is a dangerous half-truth. When markets are treacherous and uncertainty is high, first movers often flounder because consumers aren’t ready for their ideas or are put off by crummy early offerings. Companies that launch their products or services later end up as winners, in part, because they learn from the fatal missteps of eager early movers. Amazon was not the first online bookstore; the defunct Books.com and Interloc were among the earlier entrants. Netscape, the first commercially successful Web browser, was launched years before Google. Myspace was a successful social networking service before Facebook. Couchsurfing was founded before Airbnb. Being first is risky when smart fast followers can learn from your troubles and pass you

But the first-mover advantage is greatly overstated. In a watershed study, researchers compared the fates of “pioneer” companies that had been the first to exploit a market and “settlers” that had followed the pioneers into the market. Drawing on data from five hundred brands in fifty product categories, they found that almost half of pioneers failed, compared to 8 percent of settlers. The surviving pioneers took 10 percent of their market, on average, compared to 28 percent for settlers. Getting into the market early was indeed important—“early market leaders have much greater long-term success,” the researchers noted—but those “early” market leaders “enter an average of 13 years after pioneers.”7 The consensus of researchers today is that, yes, being first to market can confer advantages in certain specific circumstances, but it comes at the terrible cost of an inability to learn from the experience of others.

things everywhere in the universe. The fundamental unit, the prime mover of all life, is the replicator. A replicator is anything in the universe of which copies are made. Replicators come into existence, in the first place, by chance, by the random jostling of smaller particles. Once a replicator has come into existence it is capable of generating an indefinitely large set of copies of itself.

The consensus of researchers today is that, yes, being first to market can confer advantages in certain specific circumstances, but it comes at the terrible cost of an inability to learn from the experience of others. Better to be—like Apple following Blackberry into smartphones—a “fast follower” and learn from the first mover.

Thomas Aquinas (1225—1274) states that God is a simple being. Although God is eternal, a material world, Universe, is not eternal. For Aquinas, God’s existence is his essence, the basis of Divine simplicity. For anything else, there is a distinction between existence and essence. Aquinas defined his five arguments for the existence of God in his book Summa Theologica: 1. The First Way: Motion. (The argument from "first mover.") 2. The Second Way: Efficient Cause. (The argument from universal causation.) 3. The Third Way: Possibility and Necessity. (The argument from contingency). 4. The Fourth Way: Gradation. (The argument from degree.) 5. The Fifth Way: Design. (The argument from final cause or ends [Teleological argument].)

Religious thinking is more accurate in realizing there can be no creation without the mover. Zero point is the "first" point. This zero point is something. It did not come from nothing. The World, as a "physical reality," has its physical and temporal beginning, but the force empowering it, the Universal Mind, is out of time, so there can be no notion of time to refer to before the Big Bang.

But simple consumer reluctance to switch providers is a major obstacle to competition in retail financial services. It is a well-known joke in the industry that customers change their spouses more often than their banks. They all seem the same: why transfer your loyalty from Tweedledee to Tweedledum? This inertia on the part of retail buyers is common across all financial products. Credit cards have consistently been one of the most profitable retail banking products. Bank of America, ‘first mover’ in this industry, continues to hold a strong position, despite aggressive attempts by entrants to solicit new business. Many people just do not like buying financial services, and minimise the time and effort they devote to their purchase as a result. The days when retail customers of financial services were rewarded for their loyalty are long gone. The replacement of a relationship-based culture by a transaction-based one means that the best deal is almost always obtained by shopping around aggressively rather than by building trust. Customer perceptions have lagged behind this harsh reality. But

Conservative elites first turned to populism as a political strategy thanks to Richard Nixon. His festering resentment of the Establishment’s clubby exclusivity prepared him emotionally to reach out to the “silent majority,” with whom he shared that hostility. Nixon excoriated “our leadership class, the ministers, the college professors, and other teachers… the business leadership class… they have all really let down and become soft.” He looked forward to a new party of independent conservatism resting on a defense of traditional cultural and social norms governing race and religion and the family. It would include elements of blue-collar America estranged from their customary home in the Democratic Party. Proceeding in fits and starts, this strategic experiment proved its viability during the Reagan era, just when the businessman as populist hero was first flexing his spiritual muscles. Claiming common ground with the folkways of the “good ole boy” working class fell within the comfort zone of a rising milieu of movers and shakers and their political enablers. It was a “politics of recognition”—a rediscovery of the “forgotten man”—or what might be termed identity politics from above. Soon enough, Bill Clinton perfected the art of the faux Bubba. By that time we were living in the age of the Bubba wannabe—Ross Perot as the “simple country billionaire.” The most improbable members of the “new tycoonery” by then had mastered the art of pandering to populist sentiment. Citibank’s chairman Walter Wriston, who did yeoman work to eviscerate public oversight of the financial sector, proclaimed, “Markets are voting machines; they function by taking referenda” and gave “power to the people.” His bank plastered New York City with clever broadsides linking finance to every material craving, while simultaneously implying that such seductions were unworthy of the people and that the bank knew it. Its $1 billion “Live Richly” ad campaign included folksy homilies: what was then the world’s largest bank invited us to “open a craving account” and pointed out that “money can’t buy you happiness. But it can buy you marshmallows, which are kinda the same thing.” Cuter still and brimming with down-home family values, Citibank’s ads also reminded everybody, “He who dies with the most toys is still dead,” and that “the best table in the city is still the one with your family around it.” Yale preppie George W. Bush, in real life a man with distinctly subpar instincts for the life of the daredevil businessman, was “eating pork rinds and playing horseshoes.” His friends, maverick capitalists all, drove Range Rovers and pickup trucks, donning bib overalls as a kind of political camouflage.

The creators were not selfless. It is the whole secret of their power—that it was self-sufficient, self-motivated, self-generated. A first cause, a fount of energy, a life force, a Prime Mover. The creator served nothing and no one. He lived for himself.

Their era was ending when Jim Clyman got to Independence in ’44 and found Bill Sublette, who had first taken wagons up the Platte Valley in 1830, now taking invalids to Brown’s Hole for a summer’s outing. It was twenty-one years since Jim had first gone up the Missouri, forty years since Lewis and Clark wintered at the Mandan villages, thirty-three years since Wilson Hunt led the Astorians westward, twenty years since Clyman with Smith and Fitzpatrick crossed South Pass, eighteen years since Ashley, in the Wasatch Mountains, sold his fur company to Smith, Sublette, and Jackson. Thirty-two years ago Robert McKnight had been imprisoned by the Spanish for taking goods to Santa Fe. Twenty-three years ago William Becknell had defied the prohibition and returned from Santa Fe in triumph. Eighteen years ago the Patties had got to San Diego by the Gila route and Jed Smith had blazed the desert trail to San Bernardino Valley; fourteen years ago Ewing Young, with Kit Carson, had come over the San Bernardino Mountains, making for the San Joaquin. There had been a trading post at the mouth of Laramie Creek for just ten years. Bent’s Fort was fifteen years old. Now the streams were trapped out, and even if beaver should come back, the price of plews would never rise again. There were two or three thousand Americans in Oregon, a couple of hundred in California, and in Independence hundreds of wagons were yoking up. Bill Sublette and Black Harris were guiding movers. Carson and Fitzpatrick were completing the education of John Charles Frémont. Forty years since Lewis and Clark. Think back to that blank paper with some names sketched in, the Wind River peaks, the Tetons, the Picketwire River, the Siskidee, names which, mostly, the mountain men sketched in — something under a million square miles, the fundamental watershed, a thousand mountain men scalped in this wilderness, the deserts crossed, the trails blazed and packed down, the mountains made known, the caravans carrying freight to Santa Fe, Bill Bowen selling his place to go to Oregon, half a dozen wagonwrights setting up at Independence … and, far off, like a fly buzzing against a screen, Joe Meek’s cousin, Mr. Polk, preparing war. Whose country was it? III Pillar of Cloud ALL through February Congress debated the resolution to terminate the joint occupancy of Oregon, and by its deliberation, Polk thought, informed the British that we were irresolute.

Behind what is said in the collection presented here is a twofold concern. My first concern is for the individual in society and his or her seeming bent to deal with the massive problems of our times wholly in terms of systems, ideologies, and movements. These have their place, but they are not basic because they do not make themselves. The basics are the incremental thrusts of individuals who have the ability to serve and lead—the prime movers. My second concern is for the individual as a serving person and the tendency to deny wholeness and creative fulfillment to oneself by failing to lead when there is the opportunity.

being the first mover doesn’t do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you. It’s much better to be the last mover—that is, to make the last great development in a specific market and enjoy years or even decades of monopoly profits.

A second problem is called “anchoring”. In a classic study Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman secretly fixed a roulette wheel to land on either 10 or 65. The researchers span the wheel before their subjects, who were then asked to guess the percentage of members of the United Nations that were in Africa. Participants were influenced by irrelevant information: the average guess after a spin of 10 was 25%; for a spin of 65, it was 45%. In meetings, anchoring leads to a first-mover advantage. Discussions will focus on the first suggestions (especially if early speakers benefit from a halo effect, too). Mr Kahneman recommends that to overcome this, every participant should write a brief summary of their position and circulate it prior to the discussion.

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Thomas Aquinas famously laid out five arguments for the existence of God, but he characterized one of them as “the first and more manifest way.” This is the proof from motion, which can be presented simply and schematically as follows. Things move. Since nothing moves itself, everything that is moved must be moved by another. If that which causes the motion is itself being moved, then it must be moved by another. This process cannot go on to infinity. Therefore, there must exist a first unmoved mover, which all people call God.

And it can’t happen if you are stuck in bed. Or bloated with the enormity of your problems. Or satiated with the tiredness of your daily routine. - take a walk. Be a mover and not a statue- When you get tired, sleep instead of eat.- Read books that are inspirational. For me, this helps rewire the brain for a few hours. It’s hard at first. The brain tries to slap you: “I don’t need rewiring”, but for me it works. MOST importantly, feel the bonds of friendship. For three million years, we live for the tribe. This triggers oxytocin and makes us happier.

If pitches were weapons, the majority would be B-1 Lancers or Navy Seals. The B-1 pitch is up in the clouds. It features a lot of hand-waving, cool PowerPoint animations, and use of terms such as strategic, partnerships, alliances, first-mover advantage, and patented technology. Typically, it’s delivered by an MBA with a finance or consulting background.

The First Cause, the First Mover... I too had used those names in arguing with others and with myself, trying to explain the world to myself. And know I saw those names explained nothing. They were of no more use than evolution, or natural selection, or nature, or the Big Bang of these later days. All such names do is catch us within the length and breadth of our own thoughts and our own bewilderment. Although I knew the temptation of simple reason - to know nothing that can't be proved. Still I supposed that those were not the right names. I imagined that the right name might be Father. And I imagined all that that name would imply. The love, the compassion, the taking offense, the disappointment, the anger, the bearing of wounds, the weeping of tears, the forgiveness, the suffering unto death. If love could force my own thoughts over the edge of the world and out of time, then could I not see how even Divine Omnipotence might by the force of its love be swayed down into the world?

Shortly after Cheniere, Freeport put its application in to the government to transform its import facility into an export facility. But unlike Cheniere, it did not get a quick approval. Nothing seemed to be happening. Someone explained to a frustrated Smith, “In Washington, the first application is an application. The second application is public policy.” What had taken Cheniere nine months would take Freeport almost four years. The same proved true for another first-mover project, Sempra LNG at Cameron, Louisiana, as well as other newer projects. They would all have to wait.

Before 2020, I was naive. I thought that racism, intolerance, supremacism, and bigotry were isolated to the ideals of a tiny, narrow-minded group of people. I was wrong.

If we the portrait alphabet of our many-faced Maker cease our restless aim, that means the First Mover, the One Who aimed across a darkness no being had senses tuned to see, will someday Move no more.

If a networked product can begin to win over a series of networks faster than its competition, then it develops an accumulating advantage. These advantages, naturally, manifest as increasing network effects across customer acquisition, engagement, and monetization. Smaller networks might unravel and lose their users, who might switch over. Naturally, it becomes important for every player to figure out how to compete in this type of high-stakes environment. But how does the competitive playbook work in a world with network effects? First, I’ll tell you what it’s not: it’s certainly not a contest to see who can ship more features. In fact, sometimes the products seem roughly the same—just think about food-delivery or messaging apps—and if not, they often become undifferentiated since the features are relatively easy to copy. Instead, it’s often the dynamics of the underlying network that make all the difference. Although the apps for DoorDash and Uber Eats look similar, the former’s focus on high-value, low-competition areas like suburbs and college towns made all the difference—today, DoorDash’s market share is 2x that of Uber Eats. Facebook built highly dense and engaged networks starting with college campuses versus Google+’s scattered launch that built weak, disconnected networks. Rarely in network-effects-driven categories does a product win based on features—instead, it’s a combination of harnessing network effects and building a product experience that reinforces those advantages. It’s also not about whose network is bigger, a counterpoint to jargon like “first mover advantage.” In reality, you see examples of startups disrupting the big guys all the time. There’s been a slew of players who have “unbundled” parts of Craigslist, cherry-picking the best subcategories and making them apps unto themselves. Airbnb, Zillow, Thumbtack, Indeed, and many others fall into this category. Facebook won in a world where MySpace was already huge. And more recently, collaboration tools like Notion and Zoom are succeeding in a world where Google Suite, WebEx, and Skype already have significant traction. Instead, the quality of the networks matters a lot—which makes it important for new entrants to figure out which networks to cherry-pick to get started, which I’ll discuss in its own chapter.

The Perfect Pitch Here’s the general framework for successful pitches: 1. Here’s how the world works today. 2. Here’s how the world should work in the future, but here’s what’s broken/missing. 3. Here’s why no one has been able to solve this problem so far (potentially reference folks who have tried and failed). This is a massive opportunity. Whoever solves this problem is going to have to do X, Y, and Z, but will be rewarded heavily. 4. Here’s the secret to how we’re going to fix this. A secret can be a unique insight, approach, technology, invention, or some shift or change in the world that has opened up an opportunity with you being the first mover. 5. Here’s why we’re going to execute the best (best team ever, traction thus far if applicable, your unique experience as a founder, etc.).

In each case, these segments were stuck with serious business problems that had to be solved immediately but could not be addressed effectively without embracing a discontinuous innovation. Managers who are under this kind of “broken-process” pressure will sponsor a new technology ahead of the herd, but only if the system provider can commit to an end-to-end solution to their problem. That is, to win over their target segments, each of these product vendors has to commit not just to providing an excellent product, but also to fielding a complete suite of products and services to solve the entire problem for the target segment. This leads them to recruit other companies that have the necessary competencies they lack, thereby forging a whole new value chain where none existed before. Once such a team is formed and the market has rallied around its solution, all other vendors get summarily excluded from the segment (pragmatists like to standardize on a single solution once they find one that works); so these first movers get to enjoy the fruits of market leadership for a long time to come.

What really matters is generating cash flows in the future, so being the first mover doesn’t do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you. It’s much better to be the last mover—that is, to make the last great development in a specific market and enjoy years or even decades of monopoly profits. The way to do that is to dominate a small niche and scale up from there, toward your ambitious long-term vision.

The lesson is that history, including economic history, is not the logically ordered sequence of events that is presented by subsequent narratives that try to make sense of it or try to achieve public consensus. Major things happen because of seemingly irrelevant mutations in narratives that have slightly higher contagion rates, slightly lower forgetting rates, or first-mover effects that give one set of competing narratives a head start. These random events can feed back into bigger and more pervasive narrative constellations,

Another potential advantage you might have is a first-mover advantage—obviously, if you are the first out of the gate, you will enjoy a head start over your rivals, especially if you can achieve a so-called network

Blurred bodies moved in broad, paintbrush strokes in his peripheral vision—in and out, in and out—but in that whirlwind, she appeared vibrant, well-defined, permanently immovable, an Unmoved Mover. In her electrifying presence, God Himself became an apprentice, a secondary Being. He tried to speak, but in that rare moment, words refused to be excavated from the depths of his soul in time. So, he stood by—aloof, ignored—saying nothing at all.

The book, The Wind Mill as a Prime Mover, would later be used as a working reference by the Wright brothers as they built their first aircraft.

first-mover advantages can be especially strong in new markets where customers face high switching costs. The first mover in a new product category has a chance to acquire first-time buyers before any rivals enter the market. But this advantage disappears once the second entrant arrives; then, the race is on.

Conceptually, this was an approach borrowed more from the world of freight movers than communications experts. Think of each message as if it were a large house and ask yourself how you would move that house across the country from, say, Boston to Los Angeles. Theoretically, you could move the whole structure in one piece. House movers do it over shorter distances all the time—slowly and carefully. However, it’s more efficient to disassemble the structure if you can, load the pieces onto trucks, and drive those trucks over the nation’s interstate highway system—another kind of distributed network. Not every truck will take the same route; some drivers might go through Chicago and some through Nashville. If a driver learns that the road is bad around Kansas City, for example, he may take an alternate route. As long as each driver has clear instructions telling him where to deliver his load and he is told to take the fastest way he can find, chances are that all the pieces will arrive at their destination in L.A. and the house can be reassembled on a new site. In some cases the last truck to leave Boston might be the first to arrive in L.A., but if each piece of the house carries a label indicating its place in the overall structure, the order of arrival doesn’t matter. The rebuilders can find the right parts and put them together in the right places. In

intense and accurate shelling by enemy ships of the line. * To the believers—and the terrified—it was natural to look for salvation from the storm inside one of the town’s forty churches or other edifices associated with God’s work on earth. This was especially true regarding Galveston’s Negro population, to whom religion was an elemental life-force and not a conveyance for social or sartorial prestige. Organized worship for the blacks of Galveston began in the 1840s on a three-shift basis; in the town’s then-only church the white masters gathered for service in the mornings, the slaves occupied the pews in the afternoons, exiting in time for the seignoral class to move back in for evening worship. According to an aged former slave known to all as “Auntie Ellen Roe,” it was her one-time master Gail Borden—chief customs collector, later city property agent and prime mover of a dairy fortune—who was responsible for creating separate-but-equal religious facilities on the island. Auntie Ellen recalled how the Bordens “trained her carefully as to body, mind and soul after buying her, at the age of seven, from cruel slave speculators who stole little children and sold them upon the block.” In 1851, Borden secured title to a lot on Broadway, near the booming business district, and helped collect donations for a new all-Negro church. Ellen Roe contributed the first dollar, painfully earned by reciting perfectly her Sunday-School lessons, in which she was strenuously coached by Mrs. Borden and later rewarded at the rate of twenty-five cents per recitation.

I COME BEFORE DAWN Muhammad says, “I come before dawn to chain you and drag you off.” It’s amazing, and funny, that you have to be pulled away from being tortured, pulled out into this Spring garden, but that’s the way it is. Almost everyone must be bound and dragged here. Only a few come on their own. Children have to be made to go to school at first. Then some of them begin to like it. They run to school. They expand with the learning. Later, they receive money because of something they’ve learned at school, and they get really excited. They stay up all night, as watchful and alive as thieves! Remember the rewards you get for being obedient! There are two types on the path. Those who come against their will, the blindly religious people, and those who obey out of love. The former have ulterior motives. They want the midwife near, because she gives them milk. The others love the beauty of the nurse. The former memorize the prooftexts of conformity, and repeat them. The latter disappear into whatever draws them to God. Both are drawn from the source. Any movings from the mover. Any love from the beloved.

first-mover advantage,

first-mover disadvantage

In a market where copying was the norm, these entrepreneurs were forced to work harder and execute better than their opponents. Silicon Valley prides itself on its aversion to copying, but this often leads to complacency. The first mover is simply ceded a new market because others don’t want to be seen as unoriginal. Chinese entrepreneurs have no such luxury. If they succeed in building a product that people want, they don’t get to declare victory. They have to declare war.

By capitalizing on these assets, a company stands to gain customer success, brand strength, first-mover advantage,

There was a case study done on 50 different products to compare the failure rate amongst the startups, who were the first movers, i.e., who created an entirely new product or market, and the improvers who introduced something different and better than the original movers. The study concluded that the first movers had an average failure rate of 47%, as compared to the improvers, whose failure rate was 8% only.

Aquinas’s God is not Aristotle’s Prime Mover. He is a beneficent Creator and creative Architect, a composite figure from Scripture and Plato’s Timaeus. However, Aquinas’s God shares one important characteristic with Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover: He is the ultimate source of all movement and change. “Whatever is done by nature must be traced back to God as its first cause.”25 In fact, we live in a world blessed by the very act of creation. Quoting Aristotle again, “Nature creates nothing in vain”—and neither does God.

When we have an original idea to invent a product or start a company, we’re encouraged to be the first mover. There are, of course, clear advantages to speed: we can be sure to finish what we start and beat competitors to market. But surprisingly, as I’ve studied originals,

It’s important not to confuse critical mass with first-mover advantage. Being first to launch in a market might earn you congratulations on being a product visionary, but if you aren’t also the first to scale, you’ll end up as a footnote in a Wikipedia article about your competitor who did.

Too often, leaders ignore the signals, wait too long to take action, or plan for only one scenario. Not only will first-movers create new strategies, thought leadership, hacks, or exploits to align with the trend, they are likely developing third and fourth iterations already.

Electricity was a harder problem than steam had been. Though it was conceived first as a fluid, it wasn’t something that could be boiled up by heating a mass of liquid and released in controlled volumes to push a heavy piston to turn wheels. It was not a prime mover—a machine such as a windmill or a steam engine, which converts a natural source of energy into mechanical energy—it was a transfer agent. A Leyden jar discharged intermittently, in multiple bursts, each successive burst weaker than the last. A conductor—a wire, a river—could carry the charge, but when it reached the end of the wire or the other side of the river, it discharged all at once. Franklin’s electrostatic motor was powerful, yet it lacked a source of energy beyond a workman rubbing a sulfur ball to charge a Leyden jar. Assigning a workman to turn the spit by hand continued to be both simpler and less expensive. Again, unlike steam, electricity lacked obvious applications, however mysterious and fascinating it might be. With enough equipment—cat skin and amber, Leyden jar mounted with a spark gap—you could use it to light a candle. A few did, another parlor trick, but most continued to borrow a flame from the fireplace or strike a light with flint and steel.

The idea of network effects and their articulation through Metcalfe’s Law first became popular in the 1990s, as the Internet’s popularity was growing. Backed by a simplistic notion of how networks created value, the common view of network effects viewed competition between platforms as a simple matter of getting the biggest the fastest. This concept also was known as first-mover advantage.

In the past, part of the problem was that this concept was applied to businesses that didn’t have any real network effects and very little sustainable advantage, even if they were to succeed. Pets.com and Kozmo.com are both examples from the dot-com era. But another problem with the emphasis on first-mover advantage is that it gives you the wrong ideas on how you should go about scaling a network. The growth-at-any-cost mind-set is a big reason why platforms that get initial traction often fail to reach scale. Both Friendster and Myspace got big fast. But they did so largely by ignoring the effect this growth had on the quality of their platforms.

In a more nuanced analysis of network effects, the importance of first-mover advantage largely disappears. Yes, growth is very important, especially when multiple platforms are battling for control. Because of competitive pressure, most platforms feel a strong pressure to amass users as quickly as possible. This urgency is appropriate. However, growth is not an end in itself. A large, incumbent network has an advantage over new entrants and smaller competitors, but that advantage matters only if it’s sustainable.

It is in disruptive innovations, where we know least about the market, that there are such strong first-mover advantages. This is the innovator’s dilemma.

Many billion-dollar entrepreneurs got their start in emerging industries because they had skills in the industry. But they were not the first movers. When the industry emerged, they examined the leading products and improved upon them. They compared the benefits offered by the existing products with the unmet needs of the emerging market. This gave them a foothold, which they used to dominate the market. This suggests that first movers don’t always win. Imitators and improvers can do better if the first movers haven’t guessed right. In fact, first movers dominate only about 11 percent of the time.2

In fact, there may be a first mover disadvantage. Netscape was the first popular web browser. It failed. Other first movers included Visicalc, Digital Research, Ampex, and Archie. Table 3 shows some first movers and the ultimate winners. Contrary to the myth, there does not seem to be a first-mover advantage because fast followers can often profit from the first movers’ mistakes. About 50 percent of first movers fail, and only 11 percent dominate their markets.1 Researchers Peter Golder and Gerard Tellis found that innovators got only 7 percent of the market. First movers need to spend time and money to educate customers, to convince them they have a need for the new product or service, and to get them to buy. This is not easy. The ultimate winners often learned from the first movers’ mistakes and shortcomings, used this information to improve their own product or strategy, and won.

Jobs was not a first-mover. He imitated and improved in an emerging technology to lead it. But he imitated and improved better than anyone else. He understood his market and offered convenience and style. He developed platforms around his core products, controlled the ecosystem of all the products and services being sold on Apple’s networks, and built one of the world’s greatest companies.

C-suites and boards who wait for clarity run the risk of being elbowed aside by aggressive first movers who may corner scarce resources or market positions that followers struggle to replicate.

at the center of the circle, is sure to be a figure of uncanny charisma, the one who first sussed out like-minded individuals among the movers and shakers in government and business and media, who had the daring to approach them and the skill to convince them to risk everything in pursuit of revolution, his totalitarian ideal. Even more than the others who comprise the inner circle, that individual must be eliminated to discourage