If you are “one in a million” in China, there are 1,379 exactly like you.
If you want to grasp the enormity of numbers we toss around daily, please think through the following examples that try to put context to how enormous the number million really is.
Each dot below represents 1. In this first example, we graphically show black dots for the 582 people who are not millionaires and one red dot for the millionaire. Luckily, you and I know a lot more than 583 people and almost none are millionaires. Does that mean we get to be the next millionaire, right?
In this picture we see that 1 out of every 1,489 gets a perfect score on the American SAT tests. It’s clear that going from the number of dots above to the number of dots below is a significant increase.
Abraham may have been getting a raw deal or maybe he has much better clarity into the sky but the number of stars waitbutwhy.com says are visible is the below 2,500 dots.
We start to get serious when we depict a truly large number like 47,000! I can’t imagine counting that many dots!
And yet we still are not even close to the numbers we’ve talked about in thinking of a million. Take a deep breath and try to wrap your head around even just 100,000…
Now try to comprehend one million. Keep scrolling and we’ll see you in a minute at the bottom.
If you’re beginning to grasp the enormity a million, well done. Unfortunately, a million isn’t even close to the numbers being discussed today in Israel.
Three companies have been sold in Israel in just the last month that put the numbers above to shame. I’m not “playing around” when I say that an Israeli “on-line gaming” company sold for 500,000,000 dollars! https://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-5001084,00.html
Ready for that in dots? Neither am I.
If that were not enough, it was only a couple weeks earlier that a Japanese company bought an Israeli pharmaceutical company for 1,100,000,000 dollars! If you had trouble reading that number it was 1.1 BILLION dollars. I would have thought you could read two little ones and 8 zeros with all that dot exercise but I think you are getting the idea of the enormity of these numbers. https://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-4993542,00.html
These two sales impressed me enough to write to Kehila News asking to write on these huge developments. But I hadn’t gotten around to writing about it until today. Today, I decided I MUST write about this because I saw this article about the purchase of a third company for a whopping 11.9 BILLION dollars. https://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-5008769,00.html
In Israel not very many people earn a salary that allows them to work hard, save aggressively and get ahead. For most people Israeli’s, the plan to aggressively save for 5 years will actually put them further away from purchasing a house than they were when they started. Demand is just too high and supply remains too low.
For this reason, Israeli’s are extremely entrepreneurial. It is no small chance Israel is called the “Startup Nation”. For foreigners who have $50,000 or $100,000 that they are willing to put into a high-risk investment, Israel is more than ideal. Please note the “high-risk” part. Many Israeli’s don’t make it. Some are downright swindlers. But there are several organizations and people working to connect interested investors with good honest Israeli’s who are wanting to start truly life-altering companies. Some are in agri-tech like believer-owned Ariel Global which is looking for a seed of $150,000. Others are in the security industry like Dakar Eilat’s Initiative Defense Solutions. These are just two of the startups that my company is assisting but there are hundreds of others equally worthy.
Whether these companies become worth millions or billions one day, the reality is that any of these numbers is extremely large and worth a closer look by anyone who wants to invest.