There are many ways to create, spot and make use of opportunities. Here are a few:
Creating your own: It can be a business, a blog post, a project, a side-hustle, a presentation to an audience of one. Beginning something without someone’s explicit permission is an opportunity. Previously, one needed a gatekeeper, be it a literary agent or a record executive to get to the next level. This gap has now been made redundant on many fronts. While you now need to work harder to get noticed in the clutter, saying you don’t have any opportunities to showcase your work to the world is a bit of a cop-out.
Spotting a gap or a need: A group or team that is waiting for a leader to guide and teach them, a problem no one has found a solution to, an idea that needs an evangelist (like a Steve Wozniak needed a Steve Jobs), all of these are opportunities hiding in plain sight. Any business or person that has made a difference falls into this category.
Making the most of an existing opportunity: Many people get opportunities but are unable, for whatever reason, to make the most of them. In the early 2000s, the Indian cricket team tried many wicketkeepers — Rahul Dravid, Parthiv Patel, Dinesh Karthik, Deep Dasgupta, and Ajay Ratra. It took just one swashbuckling inning from a certain MS Dhoni in a match against Sri Lanka to cement his place as a keeper batsman in the team. Promoted up the order to accelerate the scoring, he hammered 183 runs and the rest, as they say, is history.
Giving others an opportunity: Everyone who has ever made it big did so because someone saw their ability and lifted them up.
Discovering parallel opportunity: All of us know Andre Agassi but not many of us know Brad Gilbert, his coach who coached him to six Grand Slam titles. Brad Gilbert won 20 singles titles in his career but never won a Grand Slam. A list of the people that he has coached reads like this — Andre Agassi, Andy Roddick, Andy Murray, among others. He took all of the knowledge and translated it into a successful coaching career. In a similar vein, Sanjay Bangar, the current batting coach of the Indian cricket team, never enjoyed a great career but many players have credited his role as the batting coach. Discovering that your talents and abilities can be used better in a different realm is an opportunity waiting to be taken.
Experimenting with a new opportunity: 5 years back, no one knew what a Podcast was. Today, it’s a burgeoning industry and is poised for massive growth. People suddenly discovered a way to speak about a topic they were passionate about and interview people they found interesting. It is a new opportunity waiting to be taken.
None of these are easy and require varying degrees of effort to be put in.
As Ann Landers said ‘Opportunities are usually disguised as hard work, so most people don’t recognize them.’
