Recently, I was looking at some quotes about business and life in general and I ran across the old unattributed quote: “Opportunity only knocks once”. Who said that? Are you kidding? Opportunity knocks constantly. Every single day some opportunity crosses in front of you. Sure, opportunity doesn’t broadside us every day but it’s there. Much of the time, I think that we don’t hear opportunity knocking. Guess what? He doesn’t try and kick down the door. He taps on the door and refuses to ring the doorbell. AND we have our iPod headphones in or have a Bluetooth jammed in our ear and can’t hear the tapping on the door.
We have to take the initiative to focus on opportunities. We have to be listening for them to arise. A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post called “Why am I NOT doing this?“. In that post, I said used a quote by Seth Godin:
You don’t have to settle. It’s a choice you get to make every day.
This is one of those choices. Do you want to continue going along your merry way hoping that that opportunity will kick in the door? Or… do you want to stop and listen for that ever so slight tap on the front door? If you put yourself out there… if you listen for the opportunity and are ready to seize it… you’ll be amazed what will happen. All of a sudden you’ll start seeing potential. You’ll start tripping over opportunities that you were just walking past before. Some of them will be good some won’t. That will be your call.
On my email the tagline is: “You cannot discover new oceans unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore”. Is it your time to row out there and lose sight of the shore? Time to listen for that tap of opportunity and stop saying “If only…”.
What opportunities are tapping on your door right now? Or… did one knock down the door? Tell us about it.
Be daring…be creative!
Jeremy
Jeremy Lattimore is the creative problem solving guru behind RefocusingTechnology.com and Borea Systems. Currently, he’s obsessed with business automation/efficiency and social networks. His question to you is: “How is your technology making you more efficient TODAY?”.
2 Comments
If it’s knocking on your door more than once, it’s not an opportunity, it’s an illusion.
That’s not to say that there aren’t plenty of opportunities out there – but only rarely do they come knocking on your door. You’ll be doing something else, minding your own darned business, when it suddenly comes to you: why do people tolerate this crap? It’d be so easy for a business to treat customers better – and the business would benefit as well.
Even most of those are illusions. Often times, the reason nobody does that is that someone has tried, and figured out what you haven’t yet discovered.
I’m retired now, but my life’s work has been to start new businesses, get them off the ground, and then sell them to someone who considers himself better at operating a business than starting it from scratch. Fine with me; I figure the fun’s in getting the thing started, not in the drudgery of repeating my actions over and over and over. And I’ve never had to advertise a business for sale, never had to go knocking on someone’s door. Potential buyers come to me, instead.
If someone is knocking on my door, almost always it’s someone who wants to hire a salesman, and they have this foolish idea that “marketing” is shoving whatever they have down others’ throats. In fact, “marketing” is figuring out how to offer what others want to snatch from your hands. Why bully people for a living, when you can make a lot more money delighting them?
If you want to be great, you don’t ask others for permission – and if you want opportunities, you don’t listen for a knock on the door, you simply open your eyes, and say to yourself, “how could I make someone a whole lot happier than they are?” You’ll then be flooded with the opposite problem: which opportunities are the ones which are the most fun, and put the most jingle in your pocket? (Hint: those two things usually go together….)
By the way I like the new website. I am also currently in the process of redesigning my site.
You have to go out and pursue opportunity. By putting yourself out there and making connections you are creating opportunity. Go out and watch speakers, join clubs, start a blog or a website. Opportunity will then come knocking on your door way more often.