How can a missed opportunity be a golden opportunity?

Have you ever found yourself wondering what your life might be like if you had taken advantage of some opportunity of the past (“What if I had invested in Microsoft back when Bill Gates first did an IPO?”, “What if I had stayed in my high-school rock band and pushed through to stardom?”)…

We all have these moments of fantasy – and then the balloon pops and the poster shown in this picture becomes all too real (This poster is from a funny sight called “Demotivators.com” ), and most of us have a few missed opportunities where we know we should have “taken the leap”, where we almost did…but at the last minute we wimped out – and a great thing that we could have done passed us by like the train in the poster.

But that is the point that we can find a new opportunity… As “Opportunity” is not something that comes once in a while like you may have believed, but instead it is more like a “force” or a ephemeral “raw material” that is always around you.  Opportunity waits to be seen and then taken, it is not a lottery that rarely comes close to you…no, it is all around you.

But you have to learn to see it, and missed opportunities, weather real or fantasy, can be the impetus for creating new opportunities to succeed and grow.  So lets look at a few examples.

The greatest thing about a missed opportunity is that it provides you with a case study about yourself and how you missed that opportunity.  

• Did you see it but were too afraid of the risks to attempt it?
• Did you miss it altogether because you were too focused on something else?
• Did you notice the opportunity but dismiss it as “unimportant” because you did not think deeply enough about its implications?
• Did you think in your mind that you could make your own opportunity, but then allowed other things to crowd out your idea until it was too late and someone else grabbed it?
• Do you see lots of opportunities and are excited by them all and get distracted as you flit from one to another?

These five are the basic reason we miss opportunities. The last one is especially important to me – I call it “Opportunity ADD” I get myself involved in too many things and tend not to get any of them done if I don’t use some ruthless discipline.

The missed opportunity allows us to discover how we react and what areas of the five points above we need to work on.  Here are some opportunity “lock-in” suggestions:

1.) Realize that you are not the only one who will notice an opportunity, but also realize that few will act on one – make you choice, grab the reigns and create a plan to pursue your opportunity until you see it through.

2.) Make sure you have the time and resources to accomplish what needs to be done for this opportunity – if not perhaps you need to partner with someone or even leave it – finding something else.

3.) Don’t get distracted by other opportunities when you are working on one now – just write the ideas down and move on with what you are doing, otherwise you will never get anything done!

4.) Remember that as you work though an opportunity, you will create more opportunity – it is an inexhaustible resource that gets larger the more you use it up.

Opportunity is hazy when looked at in the present, but become crystal clear when seen from the past – you need to remember that the fantasy that you have of wishing you “knew then what you know now” can be a motivator to get you to “learn now what you will wish you knew” and make the fantasy a reality. You can make today’s opportunities become reality.

Many have done this, why not you?

David T. McKee

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009 at 2:59 pm and is filed under Intentional Thinking, Overcoming Obstacles, Success. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.