When Opportunity Knocks
You’d better answer the door, because it may not come knocking again – worse still, it will probably knock on your competitor’s door to see if they are listening. Opportunity is blind in the sense that it doesn’t really care who answers, as long as someone does.
The inspiration for this post is this great quote I saw this morning:
“The secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes.” Benjamin Disraeli
What does this statement really mean? There is certainly more to it than first meets the eye.
Firstly, the literal meaning suggests that we should have our eyes and ears open so that we can recognize an opportunity when it does come along. If we aren’t looking and listening for these things, we’ll never be aware of them and they’ll simply pass us by. There’s no fanfare, no drumroll, no thunderbolt from the blue to announce their arrival; instead opportunities are often presented to us in subtle ways that we have to learn to interpret by ourselves.
Secondly, what does it mean to be “ready”? I’m sure it could have several meanings, but the one that seems most appropriate to me is that we should have the proper attitude and mental state to enable us to recognize, accept and meet the challenge of an opportunity when it’s presented to us.
Finally, there’s another truth hidden in this simple-looking statement; perhaps the most important one of all:
“There is no such thing as the perfect opportunity.”
If there is, then I’ve never seen or heard of it. Like everything else in the world, no opportunity is perfect. The timing may not be quite right, our financial position may not be as solid as we’d like, the idea may not be exactly what we were expecting, we might lack some of the knowledge we need to execute it properly, we’ll wait until the kids are out of school, and so on…
Truly great opportunities are presented to us very rarely, maybe only once in a lifetime. But, if we wait for all the conditions to be just right, or stall out of fear of failure, we’ll miss out and we could be left waiting for a very long time.
To make it even more interesting for us, opportunities often come along during the most challenging and difficult of times, often when we feel at our lowest ebb. Take the current economic climate, for example. The world is in the grip of a recession but, if we think about it hard enough, we realize that it’s only by rising to new challenges and seizing appropriate opportunites that we’ll be able to discover a brighter future. The time is now; it is often in adverse times when new innovations are born and creatives fires burn brightest.
I’m not advocating that we should blindly seize everything that comes our way. We still need to apply due consideration and risk assessment before we make any big decision. However, few people have become successful without some form of risk, and many have faced down a tremendous personal fear of failure in order to win.
Meet Thine Enemy
Perhaps being “ready” also means being strong and prepared for a battle with our worst enemy: ourselves and own inner demons. This is a fight against the tendency of our own mind to raise obstacles and whisper inner words of doubt and discouragement, all born out of insecurity, fear of failure or looking foolish.
In order to be successful and to seize the right opportunity when it comes, we have to win this battle before we can even start. In the end, it all comes down to one simple thing… a positive and receptive attitude.
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