(MONEY Magazine) – There's never a bad time to seize opportunity, think big and change your life

In mid-April, investor and author Jim Rogers walked into MONEY's offices wearing his customary bow tie and informed our staff that we are now in the midst of a multiyear bull market that kicked off in 1998 and shows no sign of letting up.

This, of course, came as a surprise. Our economy is in a frustrating, sideways crab walk, and even the handful of optimists who expect the recent stock market run-up to continue don't anticipate anything like the returns of the 1990s.

But Rogers, who made his fortune in the 1970s as co-founder (with George Soros) of the legendary Quantum Fund, wasn't talking about stocks or bonds, but commodities--pork bellies, rice, sugar, lead and other raw materials. Hmm, I thought, I can't remember the last time I heard someone discuss commodities without invoking Hillary Clinton. And nobody is talking about bull markets these days except in tones of wistful nostalgia.

Rogers was only getting started, though. He'd come to promote his new book, Adventure Capitalist, about a three-year, round-the-world trip in search of adventure and investment ideas, and he proceeded to tick off places he deemed full of opportunities for investors and entrepreneurs. Among them: East Timor, a newly independent Southeast Asian nation; war-torn Angola in sub-Saharan Africa; and Bolivia, which Rogers says is "on the verge of great things."

The point of this is not that you ought to bet your money on Rogers' ideas. It's that, until this conversation, I'd mostly thought of Bolivia as the place where Paul Newman and Robert Redford got shot to bits in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I'm hardly ready to invest my 401(k) there, but Rogers opened my eyes to opportunities I'd never considered. What's more, at a time when many Americans look around and see nothing but diminished economic prospects, Rogers reminded me that opportunities still exist. There was something genuinely inspiring about it all.

That got me to thinking: Does the lousy news of the past few years have many of us excessively focused on the negative? Sure, by some measures the job market is as bad as it's been in decades. And yes, our dreams of riding the stock market to early retirement have been squelched. But it's worth reminding ourselves of two things: First, the widespread belief that stocks could make us all rich was delusional from the outset; and second, there are other ways to make money. To think that vision, daring, hard work and a little luck can no longer add up to great success is to lack perspective, historical and otherwise. Fortunes will continue to be made--if not in the way we all imagined a couple of years ago.

THE CASE FOR THINKING BIG

By no means is MONEY suggesting that you stop investing. It remains the best way to build wealth and fund long-term goals like retirement. But it's important to realize that almost none of the great American fortunes have been built primarily through investing--Warren Buffett being one of the exceptions that prove the rule.

As for how Americans do in fact get rich, the statistics make it pretty clear that business ownership has been the most common path. A recent survey of affluent Americans by Claritas found that the median net worth of business owners ($245,950) was nearly three times that of other workers ($84,625). And New York University economist Edward Wolff, using Federal Reserve data, found that 46.9% of the wealth of the richest 1% of Americans is in privately held businesses and in real estate other than primary residences. Only 31.6% is in financial securities.

I'm not suggesting that everyone ought to start a business; clearly, we're not all cut out for entrepreneurship or its high failure rate. Truth be told, I don't even believe that everyone ought to aspire to extraordinary riches. But "seeking your fortune" need not be defined only by a dollar figure. It's really about going after an opportunity that's big enough to sustain your dreams if you're successful. For some of us, that opportunity may be a matter of setting yourself on a new career trajectory.

Still, the question remains: In such a dispiriting time, why should anyone be confident that big opportunities still exist? The answer, most fundamentally, is that there's always room for profitable innovations, for ventures that deliver new value--and that's true whether the economy is going up or down. That may sound obvious, but Americans have a long history of forgetting it in times like this. "We're always drawing trend lines from downturns," says Gerald Gunderson, an economist at Connecticut's Trinity College and the author of The Wealth Creators: An Entrepreneurial History of the United States. During the Great Depression, for instance, Americans were convinced that the country had used up every possibility for innovation. "Of course," says Gunderson, "within 10 or 20 years, people thought that was funny."

Opportunity may have been easier to envision when it was embodied by a vast American frontier. But even in the 19th century, opportunity wasn't in free land itself. The West and its natural resources were all but worthless until railroads and communications developed and made it possible to extract value. That kind of technological and organizational change happens faster and far more often these days. The matrix of today's $14 trillion economy is so vast and complex and dynamic that it constantly generates new niches.

And niches are crucial, if by their very nature hard to see. Maury Klein, a historian at the University of Rhode Island and the author of a new book called The Change Makers: From Carnegie to Gates, How Great Entrepreneurs Transformed Ideas into Industries, makes the case that opportunity has almost always been found by ferreting out and exploiting the small spaces between big industries. As he puts it, "negative is macro, opportunity is micro." Similarly, historian John Steele Gordon notes the striking number of American fortunes that have been made not in big businesses but in ancillary ones. The Annenberg fortune, for example, grew out of the huge success of TV Guide; the Pullman fortune was built on the prosaic railroad sleeping car.

WHEN BAD MEANS GOOD

There's no denying that building a business is easier when times are good. But economic slumps have mitigating factors, one being that the opportunity costs are smaller. Whether it's spent putting together a business plan or inventing a product, time has always been the largest cost of innovation--and your time is simply worth less when your alternatives are limited, especially if you're out of work.

Economic downturns also present special windows for those willing to go against conventional wisdom. Competition is weakened and capital is scarce. Andrew Carnegie twice consolidated his hold on the steel industry during bad times by doubling down when labor and materials were cheap.

Jim Rogers takes this notion a step further. He looks not just for weakness but for outright despair and disgust. His case for raw materials boils down to a perception that "everyone hates commodities." And here's how he explains his interest in East Timor, Angola and Iraq: "Whenever a long war ends, people are discouraged, demoralized, exhausted; they don't have vision, energy or capital. If you're willing to show up in a place like that, you're going to be very successful." His reason for wading back into Japan is based in part on its high suicide rate. "When I see despondency, I at least start thinking about whether to act," he says. Rogers' reasoning may sound extreme, even distasteful, but the value of contrarian thinking holds with more conventional financial decisions--as well as career moves.

TRANSCENDING RISK

Contrarian thinking sounds risky, especially in a precarious economic climate. Do you have to take outsized risks to get outsized rewards? Yes and no. Many of the great entrepreneurial business leaders have been portrayed as masters at minimizing risk.

But when you look closely at these lives, there is usually a point, or several, where they willingly bet the store. Carnegie famously said that the way to get rich is to "put all your eggs in one basket and watch that basket." Ultimately, says Klein, in their willingness to take large risks, the great entrepreneurs "did not buck or discard convention so much as transcend it." Rogers, I think, offers some insight into this notion. For all his deeply contrarian calls, he insists he's not a risk taker. "I just buy things that are cheap and people aren't interested in," he says. "I don't think that's taking a risk--it's taking advantage of an opportunity."

Maybe it's enough to say that there are different kinds of risks, and people who become rich tend to be expert at recognizing them, sizing them up and, when an opportunity presents itself, acting in spite of them. Gunderson puts it this way: "It's not that they don't see the risks. It's just that they believe those risks can be overcome--and they tend to see that the benefits will outweigh the risks."

Easier said than done, perhaps, which explains the vast library of self-help and success literature. Much of the advice, as you'd expect, is platitudes and hokum. But the best of it sounds strikingly similar to the lessons historians draw from the lives of great entrepreneurs--and, for that matter, the folksy advice Jim Rogers dispenses. Find a niche. Be the best at what you do. Love your work. Be ready to fail and start over. And don't focus on getting rich; instead, be passionate about your enterprise, and the money is likely to come.

What follows are stories of real people who are acting on those principles. Not all are rich, and some may never be. But each has a vision and is willing to take risks. They'll need some luck too. But as the article on page 85 shows, even luck may be something you can actively pursue--given the inspiration. Read on.