A story of a beach merchant in Sri Lanka.

A friend of mine has recently told me this story. Even though it's seemingly an irrelevant holiday tale, it's, in fact, a timeless lesson on business and the fallacy of tunnel vision.

My friend entered a beautiful, unspoiled, wild beach somewhere in Sri Lanka. Right at the point when the path meets the sand, he noticed an older man sitting next to a blanket full of onions.

He didn't care at that very moment. But after two hours spent on the beach, he got very thirsty. There was no single store, merchant, monger anywhere near, just the old man next to the beach entrance.

He approached him and asked: "Why do you sell onions here? Why don't you sell coconuts? It's hot out here, you would earn lots of money by selling coconuts or something to drink, so why do you sell ONIONS?"

The older man replied with evident confusion, "But....but.....I sell Onions. That's what I've been doing my whole life. I don't sell coconuts."

My friend asked, "Is there anything preventing you from buying coconuts in the nearby town and selling them here instead of these onions?"

The older man looked baffled "Well, I don't know... I could do that...but I sell onions. That's what I do."

This often gets me wondering how many times I sold onions next to the beach and remained deaf to signals from the market and users.