Opportunity Will Knock, But It Will Not Wait!

Opportunity Is Knocking...

The word opportunity means an appropriate or favorable time or occasion. It is a specific window of time for something to get done. Gayle Sayers, the NFL Hall Of Fame running back who played for the Chicago Bears, made the following statement about opportunity. He said, “Give me 18 inches of daylight, that’s all I need”. He was saying, in the fast-moving, high contact world of football, if you give me just a little room, I can make something happen. How about us? Are we able to take what’s given, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant and make something great happen? No one else would make the claim they only needed this small window of opportunity. If we’re going to pursue anything of significance, we must take advantage of opportunities. Let me caution you. Opportunities may not come packaged with a bow on top. They may not come addressed to you. You will have to learn to recognize them and be prepared to act. This is why many of us are not successful. We simply are not prepared for the opportunities that come. We, sometimes, are so focused on what we don’t have and why we can’t have what we want, that when we have the chance to act, we are unprepared. In order to take advantage of opportunities, we have to look for them. We must prepare for them. We must know what we will do when the opportunity arrives. This is how to prepare for an opportunity. First, we must look for them. Many people miss opportunities because they don’t even look for them. Not only that, but some of us don’t know how to recognize them. It’s a tragedy to be looking at an opportunity and not be able to recognize it. This is like growing up in the 1970’s where 8-track music tapes were popular. You could listen to just about any type of music on them. The problem with the 8-track, though, was that there was no way to select specific songs or to move from one song or a part of a song to the next . You had to listen to the entire tape all the way through. For many of us, once an opportunity is past, it will take a while, if ever, to come around again. The second thing we must do is have a plan of action for when the opportunity presents itself. We must know what we will do when it’s time to do it. There are few things more frustrating than to miss out on something because we are not prepared. I can remember many times as a child, missing the school bus. I didn’t miss the bus because it came early. I missed it because I wasn’t prepared at its scheduled arrival time.  Third, we must understand opportunities are time sensitive. They don’t last forever. Just like when we choose to wait out someone who knocks on our doors at our homes, realizing if we don’t act in a reasonable amount of time, they will go away. Opportunities are the same. They will knock. Some will knock forcefully, and some will knock lightly. Regardless of the intensity of the knock, they will not knock long. Opportunities have feelings. They know when they are not wanted or respected. They will move on. And one of the harshest life lessons is to see someone else thriving in an opportunity we chose not to act upon. Please know, opportunity is knocking. It knows your address. It’s specific to you. If you miss this one, you may not have another. Wait. What was that? I think I just heard someone at your door…