The idea that’s in my mind right now is the idea of capitalizing on opportunities.
As a lot of us go through our day, week, life, et cetera, we’ll see different opportunities.
In a lot of cases what will happen is we’ll say, okay, well it doesn’t look right or it might be a scam and it looks like it’s really good but I just don’t have time.
What I think is really important to understand is that if you are going to achieve everything that you want, you are going to need to explore a number of opportunities. What this means by extension is that a number of these opportunities are going to end up being failures. They’re either an outright bad opportunity, the timing isn’t right, but if you are going to achieve a whole lot you have to be willing to go through those failures to be able to figure out where those opportunities for outsized gains are.
I think one of the things that hold a lot of people back is that they have an intrinsic fear of failure that prevents them from fully capitalizing on opportunities. What I keep thinking about in my head is to say, how is it that I can identify an opportunity that looks like it might be legitimate, test it as fast as possible, and then if there is real potential there scale it as quickly as possible.
I think that if you develop that skill, you can more or less become successful any place in the world because in the internet era there are truthfully opportunities any and everywhere. The problem is that at the very beginning it’s really hard to discern between the opportunities that are legitimate or fraudulent. Finding the ones that are right for you and avoiding the ones that are going to just be a waste of time.
What most people end up doing is saying they don’t have time for all this and just forget about it. Unfortunately, this is a recipe for keeping everything exactly the way it is.
For a lot of people, that’s perfectly fine; they have no intention of making material changes in their life.
But for people who are really driven and ambitious and want to achieve big things in their life, they have to be able to go through the process of unpacking opportunities.
I think developing the ability to rapidly assess and test opportunities is probably one of the most valuable things you can do. With that said, at the moment it may not feel like something that is really high impact. The way that almost every opportunity works are that usually there is a time or money investment that’s required upfront. There’s also usually some delay before you realize the value in the form of time savings, additional gains, revenue, whatever.
However, going through this process is a critically important part of really being successful as an entrepreneur.
Net-Net: The takeaway for today is to get good at identifying and testing new opportunities and then working them into your life so that you can continually become more effective in all the things that you do.
