Creating Your Desired Opportunities

A lot of people waste their time waiting for opportunities to come while everything around them screams of opportunities. As you live and interact with people, there are many things that you can convert to opportunities instead of waiting for the ample opportunity to come. The truth is that even if an opportunity comes and you are not prepared for it, you will not know that it is an opportunity. But if you are always ready and prepared, you can convert what others see as challenges to opportunities. So opportunities come to the people who create them and not to the people who sit and wait for them.

You will be surprised the kind of opportunities that lie around you but they may not look like it. Obviously, more often than not, opportunities do not look appealing on the peripheral - they may even look like problems or challenges, but if you can look beyond them, then you will see the beautiful opportunity behind those challenges. The same situation that presents to you also presents to someone else but what makes the difference is how you respond to it. If you see it as a potential problem, then you will be negatively biased about it, but when you see it as an opportunity, you will respond positively to it and use it for your profit.

A friend of mine shared with me about his experience when he went to undertake the compulsory one year National Youth Service programme after his university education. He was posted to a particular village and when he arrived, he discovered that the closest banking facility was in the next village. And even the nearest ATM was also very far. What this means is that if the locals wanted to perform transactions or even to withdraw money, they will have to take transport to the location. When everyone was seeing this as a problem and has even written to authorities to help them out, my friend saw opportunities in it. He went to the bank and applied for a P.O.S machine and got a partnership deal with the bank and he established a small P.O.S centre in front of his house.

When anyone wanted to perform transactions (like withdrawing, deposit, and payment of online bills), instead of transporting themselves to the bank or the ATM, they will come to his shop and he will charge them a token for the transaction which he will perform with his P.O.S machine. He discovered that after few weeks of starting the business, he made enough money to expand the business and even employ other hands to help him run the business. What people saw as a problem was what he used to create his opportunity. By the time he was through with his one year National Youth Service program and was leaving, he had made many times his NYSC salary on his P.O.S business and even when he sold the business to his successor, he made some really good profits.

While people are waiting for opportunities to knock at their doors, learn to create your own opportunities from what you have. You do not have to be given opportunity to have opportunity. Obviously, everything around you can become an opportunity for you even what looks like a problem. My friend once said:

Only failures see problems in opportunities. But the successful people will always see opportunities even in what people call problems.

The time you waste while waiting for opportunity is gone and may not be gotten back. You have to get busy with what you have and from where you are and you will be surprised the kind of opportunities that you already have staring at you in the face. Opportunities are maximized by the people already engaged in working. The same opportunity may come to two different people and they will have dissimilar results because of their different responses to it. One thing to also know is that time itself is an opportunity and one of the greatest ones at that. So if you will be able to maximise your time appropriately and utilise it properly, you will discover that you have an enough opportunity already to make your life to count.

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