“Awareness of opportunities, that is the place we get stuck”.
That looks to me like an opportunity to say more. So here are my thoughts on how to create and recognize opportunities in life.
Sow many seeds
Another comment on my earlier post quoted the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes: “Give portions to seven, yes to eight, for you do not know what disaster may come upon the land.” In other words, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. If you want to have a lot of opportunities, start a lot of small things and watch to see which ones become big.
If everything relies on one plan – if there’s no plan B (or C or D or E) – you’re risking everything on the always-imperfect chance that plan A will work out.
A friend of mine is an aspiring actress. She auditions for everything. Fighting prostitute in Spartacus? Sure! Hobbit? Sure! Angel for one scene in the small indie film The Insatiable Moon? Sure! (She got two out of three of those roles. She’s too tall for a hobbit.) She gets tired of it – but that’s the way to create opportunities.
If you want to be struck by lightning, you need to go out in every thunderstorm and climb the biggest tree you can see.
Know what an opportunity looks like
Over Christmas my wife and I did a jigsaw puzzle. It was one of those where the picture isn’t on the box (the picture on the box is of the scene you’d see if you stood inside the puzzle facing out). It was a great lesson in spotting opportunities.
To find the right piece in a puzzle like that, you need to have an idea of what you’re looking for. You say things like, “It’s a Y-shaped piece, and it has that exact shade of yellow on the end tab, I should be able to see this…”.
At the same time, sometimes the piece doesn’t look exactly the way you expect. Perhaps the little bit of yellow is smaller than you thought. Maybe the pattern changes suddenly on this piece. You don’t have the picture, so you can’t be sure.
What we did was to start with the pieces that were easiest to spot, that were clear matches to what we were looking for or obviously went together. Once we’d found those, we had more context to use in looking for the rest.
At the same time, while we were working on a face, or part of a building, if we spotted something that fitted somewhere else we grabbed it then – we didn’t wait until later.
Some of the best opportunities you’ll ever get are ones you’ll find when you’re looking for something else.
Have clear criteria
Exactly because opportunities come along all the time (when you’re looking for them), you need to have some criteria for which to take and which to leave alone. Good questions to ask include:
• Does this take me closer to, or further from, my ultimate goal?
• What benefits will it give me?
• What costs are involved?
• Does this have the potential to open up to something larger, or is it clearly a one-off?
• If it did open up to something larger, would that be something I was prepared to pursue?
• If I refuse this opportunity, does that close off others in the future?
Victoria Brouhard talks a lot about “no-brainer scenarios”, where you figure out what would have to be true in order to give a clear “Yes!” to an opportunity. This is exactly what I’m talking about.
Don’t despise small opportunities
Often, the first opportunity you get from someone else is small. They want to know what you’re like – do you show up on time, do you do good work, are you easy to get on with? My friend the actress isn’t going to be offered a lead role first crack out of the box. You have to, as they say in jazz, pay your dues.
When I was a freelance writer, I several times took small projects that turned into much larger ones. On the other hand, I also took small projects that didn’t go anywhere else – but that I learned interesting and useful things from anyway, like a book of photographs of wineries that I wrote the text for.
Be ready
One of the best things you can do to prepare for opportunity is to have an “opportunity reserve”. By this I mean, structure things so that you can act on opportunities when they arrive.
Think in advance about what would need to happen if your great opportunity did occur. Could you take time from your current work? Would you be able to survive financially? What other responsibilities would someone else have to take over temporarily – would you need someone to mind your kids, mind your house, feed your fish, guest post on your blog?
If you’re totally enmeshed in your life as it is now, with no room to maneuver, how would you be able to take opportunities if they did arise?
Having these essential things taken care of becomes part of your no-brainer scenario.
So, take a look around. What do you have that you can turn into opportunities?
Mike Reeves-McMillan
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