@bnt on Money #10: Opportunity Comes A-Knockin' Pt. II (First Post After HF19!)

bnt (53)in #money • 7 years ago (edited)

Opportunity

Hello there, this is my tenth essay for you and my first one after HF19. I'm really happy because the topic that I chose is extremely relevant to HF19 but also for life in general. Get going now, not tomorrow because tomorrow never comes. Enjoy!

All feedback is welcome, appreciated and WILL be upvoted!

There are a lot of factors playing into the choices that we make. This is even truer for the choice of activities and occupations that we dedicate our lives to. We will generally choose occupations that are pleasurable, even if they're not as profitable as doing something else that we could potentially do just as well if not better.

I'm not discounting pure passion as an enabler for competency. But I am most certainly saying that our natural talents and likings do not always overlap.

Opportunity, when seized, has a tendency to multiply. Even if opportunity is constantly showing up in everyone's lives, it shows up twice as often and in more direct ways for people who identify and take it.

It is after a few cycles of identification and seizure of opportunity that one can be overwhelmed by just how many different paths put themselves in front of us. It is also after this phenomenon takes place that the game becomes not looking out for new opportunities, but identifying the ones with the most potential for us.

Almost counter-intuitively, opportunity demands singularity. Basically what that means is that trying to seize multiply opportunities will do one more harm than good. There is an incredible amount of details in every opportunity that we can focus on, but the purpose and goal should always be one at any given time. It doesn't have to be the same permanently, but it is preferable to be just one or two at all times. Focusing on the few and not the many will do one wonders.

Your Time Is Now!

Another fantastic enabler of opportunity is strategy. Strategy has a place in every moment of the life of an opportunity. At the beginning, strategy can serve as an excuse to seize an opportunity. In the middle, it will help us better seize the opportunity in question. At the end, it will help us identify what the next opportunity we take should be.

Indeed, it can be hard to lay out a strategy for opportunity. Specially if one's never done it before. But it really can be an uncomplicated exercise with generous returns. Strategy can mean nothing more than a simple pros and cons list. Something so simple that it should probably not need to be said. The stark reality is that strategy and opportunity are rarely associated and even less often combined.

It's up to each individual to discover what kind of strategy they would like to filter their opportunities through. It is important, however, that the strategy in question is generic and effective enough to put as many opportunities as possible through it.

So how does one obtain a strategy for opportunities? The unsurprising but efficient answer is experimentation . Think of ways you could test every opportunity that comes your way and then use one of these criteria to test a small opportunity. Use several approaches and see which one yields the best results, then stick to it.

Strategy is usually scalable, so when you find something that works amazingly well for small opportunities, start using it on big ones and get to work.

TL;DR:

Opportunity will knock on your door no matter what.

Be very strategic about the opportunities that you do choose to take.

Use habits and routines as leverage on yourself.