In a world overflowing with ideas, it’s easy to assume that the best ones are already taken — or worse, that they’re too simple to be worth pursuing. But Devo Harris, music producer turned tech entrepreneur, believes that assumption could be costing you millions.
Harris, who helped launch the career of John Legend and later founded the interactive streaming service Adventr, attributes much of his success to a lesson he learned in a Wharton finance class — a lesson involving a crisp $5 bill.
For weeks, that bill sat taped to the classroom whiteboard. No one touched it. Most assumed it was a leftover prop from a previous class or simply ignored it. Finally, after several sessions, one student raised her hand and asked, “Professor, why is there $5 taped to the board?” The professor peeled it off and handed it to her. “Never assume the money is someone else’s,” he said.
That moment stuck with Harris far longer than any lecture on valuation models.
“You’ll leave millions on the table by assuming someone else has already tried the idea, already gotten permission, already done the work,” he wrote on LinkedIn.
It’s a principle that’s echoed across history. People carried their belongings in bags for millennia, but it took until the 1500s for someone to sew pockets into clothing. Wheeled luggage didn’t become mainstream until 1972. The Aztecs put wheels on children’s toys but never used them for transport. Even the three-point shot in basketball existed for decades before transforming the modern game.
Obvious ideas aren’t always acted on — and that’s the opportunity.
In Harris’s own work as a producer, he often stumbled on beats or samples so perfect that he hesitated. “Surely someone else had already used this,” he’d think. But many of those simple, overlooked ideas became some of his biggest successes.
This same hesitation plays out in every industry. We don’t ask for the meeting because we think someone more important already did. We don’t pitch the idea because we assume a big company must have thought of it. We don’t apply for the job because we believe someone more qualified surely got there first.
But the truth is, some of the best opportunities are lying in plain sight, untouched — not because they aren’t valuable, but because everyone assumes someone else already picked them up.
The “$5 Bill Rule” is about rejecting that assumption. If something looks valuable, don’t wait. Reach for it. At worst, you discover it’s taken. At best, it might be yours for the taking.
So the next time you hesitate to act on a “too obvious” idea, think of that bill on the board — and ask yourself: What if no one else has picked it up yet?
Prepared by Navruzakhon Burieva
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