Lim Goh Tong

The best business is the one nobody wants. No interest means no competition.

If you grew up in Malaysia, you've been to Genting.

The cable car ride up. The fog rolling in. That sudden cold at 1,800 meters. For millions of Malaysian kids, Genting was the closest thing to going abroad without a passport.

Here's what most people don't know about how it got there:

The man who built it started as a carpenter earning 80 cents a day. Lost his father at 16, left China for Malaya at 19 After the war he built a construction business from nothing.

One evening in Cameron Highlands, working on a dam project, Lim Goh Tong felt the cool mountain breeze and had a thought: as Malaysians got richer, they'd want mountain getaways. But Cameron was too far from KL. What if he built one closer?

He picked a peak at Genting Sempah. 1,800 meters. Dense virgin jungle. No road, no water, no electricity. Nothing.

Every friend told him: You're insane. Too remote. Too expensive. Too risky.

Here's what Lim understood that they didn't:

Those weren't problems. They were the strategy.

His autobiography explains it perfectly: "The Genting project basically fitted my idea of an ideal business: no one was interested in it, which meant no competition."

He didn't tolerate the obstacles. He chose them. Every barrier that scared off a competitor was another layer of protection. The impossibility was a moat he didn't have to build.

And because he was a construction man, he had the exact skillset to pull it off. He threw every piece of equipment onto that mountain. Two shifts, round the clock. Everyone predicted the road would take 15 years.

He finished it in under 4.

Then the move that turned a resort into an empire. He invited Malaysia's Prime Minister up the mountain to lay the foundation stone. Tunku Abdul Rahman was so impressed — a private citizen building this without a single ringgit of government money — that he offered to consider a casino license.

Lim submitted the application on April 28, 1969. It was approved that same evening.

It remains the only casino license Malaysia has ever issued. Fifty-five years. In a Muslim-majority country. Not because the government loved gambling — because no one else would ever be crazy enough to build on a mountaintop to earn one.

The impossible location became a permanent, unreplicable monopoly.

Right before opening, the worst rainstorms in a century hit. 180 landslides buried the road. He repaired it in four months.

Today: RM27.7 billion in revenue. Resorts World in Las Vegas, Singapore, New York, London. A township named Gohtong Jaya after the carpenter who built a road nobody wanted.

Here's what keeps coming back to me:

We're taught to go where the demand is. Validate the market. Find the customers.

Lim went where there was nothing. Just a mountain nobody wanted. And turned every reason it shouldn't work into the reason nobody could follow.

The best business is the one nobody wants.

What's an opportunity you've seen that everyone else dismissed as impossible?