Three ways to fully take advantage of the opportunities around you

What do you associate with the word “opportunity”?

Some would respond with chance or luck. Others would say being prepared and ready, maybe even being aware.

I wouldn’t say any of those are wrong at all, opportunity, to me, runs along different spectrums. By definition, the world opportunity means:

a set of circumstances that makes it possible to do something.

The part where it says, “a set of circumstances”, is exactly why opportunity can fall under so many different categories. There are a countless amount of variables at play that surround us.

While opportunity itself can be a moving target, I believe that it’s possible to take advantage of the opportunities that are out there. Opportunities that specifically are for you only. In this post, I’d like to share how I like to think about opportunities and how I come across them.

1. Finding opportunity

This is pretty straightforward. I like the board game Scrabble, I feel like if opportunity was a physical manifestation, it would probably be Scrabble.

Finding opportunity in Scrabble is quite literally looking for something you want. Maybe you have the letters, “p”, “n”, “t”, and “s”, and you’re now looking for an “a” on the board, so you can spell “pants”.

In real life, this is more or less Googling things you want to achieve, asking people on social media who have experience with what you want to do, or letting friends and family know what you’re looking for. Nothing interesting going on here as it’s probably the most common way to come across anything.

This also assumes there’s a bit of preparedness going on here. You’re ready for a specific opportunity and you’re looking for it out in the wild.

2. Recognizing Opportunity

In Scrabble, you may see a letter, “B”, a space to the right of that letter, and then an “X” to the right of that. It might have been there for a while, or it could have just recently popped right up. You quickly check if you have the letter, “O”, so you can spell “Box”. Whether or not you had the letter “O” in your arsenal, you recognized an opportunity to get some points from letters that were at play.

In real life, a lot of times this comes from solving a problem. Let’s imagine that you’re a designer and you see a lot of people asking for advice on finding cool designs for their websites or business cards. This would be a good opportunity for you to offer your services, or maybe even design templates for people to come to when needed. Even if don’t have experience with designing either thing, you at least have the skill to pull it off, you recognized that there was is an opportunity and you’re capitalizing on it.

3. Creating opportunity

… to be continued