I was thinking today about someone who was retired and was playing a video game that’s semi-competitive, but he just plays it for fun. Usually he just walks around and, for example, takes these gyms, that’s what this game involves. Normally it’d be okay, he walks around and does his regular routine, but suddenly there was somebody who decided to use various cheating devices, and so he’s been grieving people like this individual. Now, because he’s retired, he doesn’t really have the energy to say fight back, but of course the younger people are very gung-ho about wanting to take the guy down. And so while they tried to gather people to potentially help, for example reporting the person or even in the game trying to take out the person per se, the older gentleman actually just said he just can’t fight them because he doesn’t have the energy, so he’ll just try to find somewhere else.
And it makes you wonder, because from a business point of view, that’s actually two paths you can take. You can either go head-on with your competitors, where when they’re aggressive you fight back, because the mindset would be if you don’t then they’ll bully everyone else out of the area. And so what people would normally do is they either just give them an equal amount of fight per se, or they’ll actually compile and cooperate with everyone else around the area. But you could have someone else that says I’m not going to fight these guys, I’m just going to go find another empty space, for example, or area that they’re not currently fighting for, and try to just do my business there. And it’ll probably work actually for a while, where you’re kind of taking a gamble.
If you’re the person that’s basically just running away, you could actually just let other people fight it out as you just make your money on the side. Now the risk is if those people aren’t successful, then eventually you’re going to be taken over as well. So in that case it would have been better if you actually helped the other people, but you could argue for a lot of cases too, people actually do win eventually, so a lot of people do survive that way where they just mind their own business as they say. But it makes you wonder, if you were starting a business and you had someone that was aggressively trying everything in the book to get you out, would you actually fight back or just keep running and finding some other way to make income?