I think many people look for opportunities where they can be amongst the first cohort to get involved. At least personally, I feel a bias to abandon an interest or opportunity if I realize others have already explored it thoroughly or there are others actively exploring it already. This isn’t true for normal hobbies by the way, like Chess for instance. I don’t feel I can’t start playing Chess or taking photographs or learning a new language simply because others already know much more about those things than me. However, in certain areas, like business opportunities, I do feel the bias. If there are already one or two other startups pursuing similar goals or problems (or in some cases whole fields), I get discouraged*. But in reality, there are so many smart and ambitious people (alive and dead) that the chances of being early to something impactful and worthwhile are slim. Opportunity is like a moving treadmill, you suddenly find yourself standing in front of it and it is already speeding along. It is incredibly rare to find an idle treadmill that hasn’t been turned on yet. This stinks, because you will almost always feel intimidated, inadequate or too late. After all, the treadmill is racing along and you are standing still. At a certain point though, you have to accept that this treadmill is moving and if you want to be on it you’ll have to jump on and get moving too. Any meaningful opportunity is like this. It will likely be something others discovered and began talking about and working on decades before you (it isn’t your fault you were born when you were, and in fact it’s probably better that you were for most technical challenges). There will be others working on the problem now too. They will have long blog posts explaining the intricacies of the issues, modest Twitter followings, PhD theses, and may have even received prestigious awards or grant money for their work. You will feel late, like you can’t possibly get involved and add value at this stage. But you can. You just have to jump on the treadmill and start moving. The time it takes to get caught up on decades is almost always much much shorter than that (6 months to several years, varying by technical difficulty). Once you are caught up, you are running the same speed as the others who started before you. You also benefited from other’s hard work, failed experiments, and research efforts. You were able to absorb decades worth of information in much less time, and once you absorb that information there is no difference in the information you have versus the oldest players in the space**. And the best part of life is that everyone has unique experiences to bring to the table. So your path to the treadmill will be unique, and may even have value that is critically missing amongst those early comers. Lastly, suppose you decide that this treadmill isn’t the right one for you. Well, now you are warmed up. Jumping on the next treadmill will be a whole lot less intimidating now that you got moving.
The one exception to this framing is if the opportunity you are thinking about joining in on is a bubble / goldrush. Those should definitely be avoided. A few helpful heuristics for that are asking yourself “will this thing still create value for the millionth person?”, “is the value this thing is creating more than personal financial enrichment?”, and “will this thing create similar value for early adopters and later stage participants?”.
*An ecosystem of other people / companies pursuing similar goals as you can actually be an advantage! See this essay for more.
**Ok, you could argue that the person who personally discovered something or was around for all the ups and downs of a field from the start has an advantage or some deeper understanding. Sure. But the information, as a set of facts, is the same. Usually when we imagine this kind of distinction, we are secretly importing an idea that the person involved from the start actually does have more information, in which case that just means the newer person has more catching up to do. Again, this can be done much quicker than it originally took to gain the information in the first place.
***The treadmill metaphor isn’t perfect of course. For one thing, when running on a treadmill you don’t actually go anywhere, which seems like a major flaw when discussing opportunities. But you do exert real energy and make real progress towards your cardio and general health, so I decided why not go with it? I debated changing this to a highway metaphor, where you have to merge into 70+ mph traffic, but the imagery of having to jump on a moving treadmill was viscerally accurate to the point of this post and I couldn’t abandon it.
polymathematics 
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