So you must invent and constantly be reinventing your own better future.

You don’t want to wait for a major catastrophic event to change your business for the negative. So you must invent and constantly be reinventing your own better future. That means becoming ethically opportunistic, looking at everything around you (in and outside your business or industry) with an opportunity-based focus and asking yourself continuously, “Where’s the big overlooked opportunity here?” It’s also adopting a possibility-based mind-set that looks for new, different, and better ways to attain a goal or solution or address a situation. It’s starting to see opportunities where everyone else sees problems, obstacles, limitations, or boundaries. It’s recognizing how much more you can achieve by leveraging the impact of whatever is going on all around you. The most exciting breakthroughs occur when you reach beyond the traditional way of looking at or doing something and become open and receptive to new possibilities.

Major breakthroughs are merely fresh new ways to do something. And new means new to your industry, market, competitor, or clients; not necessarily new to the world. Applying old things in new ways is a breakthrough. Applying new things in new ways is a breakthrough. Applying old things in new combinations is a breakthrough. Applying new things to new markets, or old things to old markets can be a breakthrough, too. Look at Domino’s Pizza. When Domino’s started, home deliveries had become almost obsolete because the service was undependable. But they figured out a workable system and reintroduced an updated version, and a billion-dollar breakthrough was reborn.

Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got: 21 Ways You Can Out-Think, Out-Perform, and Out-Earn the Competition by Jay Abraham