Albert Einstein said, “In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.” This principle of opportunity knocking at the least likely moment is something that must be learned by firsthand experience. You can take someone’s word for it, but when it happens to you, it’s a revelation that you will never forget.
Opportunity 1 - Every situation, properly perceived, becomes an opportunity.
Did you hear about the employee who used to walk his dog in the woods? By the end of the walk, the dog’s fur would be full of burns, stuck securely in the tiny hairs. One day he looked closely at the annoying little burrs and saw something truly inspiring. As a result, he invented what we now call Velcro!
Another employee apparently had a bad day in the glue factory and had made up what everyone thought was a bad batch of glue. The problem was that it had only marginal stickiness. A little thought into the matter and “sticky notes” were born!
Another gentleman, who sold potato chips to grocery store chains, was having marginal success in getting the store to allocate much shelf space for his product. One day his daughter came home from school with her science project. She had to go in the forest and collect leaves from the various species of deciduous trees, and when she returned, she had the leaves neatly stacked one upon the other. It gave him an idea that would change the balance of power in the potato chip wars. He came up with the idea for stacking potato chips in a can. The can took up less space than bulky bags filled with air and he was able to get more products in the smaller space than his competition. The wave of Pringles was born!
Opportunity 2 – Improve skills removes barriers, while shifting paradigms moves mountains.
You can wait for something to come along to shift your paradigm, but chances are you won’t like it, or you can artificially shift your paradigm to help you see other options. Though some artificial shifting of paradigms may appear silly to some, the effects are helpful. For example, when I was selling printers I would sometimes ask my self what I would do if I got a call from a kidnapper who had kidnapped my wife. I would then tell myself that the ransom was of the day and it had to be within normal profit margins and no one could know about the kidnapping. Failure was not an option, so I came up with prospects who I hadn’t thought of in months and other opportunities that might be worth pursuing. I would then go after those opportunities like my life depend on it, and regardless of whether I made a sale that day, I got myself out of any ruts and started the pipeline moving again. Try shifting your paradigms artificially. You might be surprised what you come up with.
Opportunity 3 – The bigger the problem, the greater the opportunity.
Here is a testimony of someone whose first daughter was born with a Down’s syndrome and a sizable hole in her heart. They didn’t tell us any of this until we had her home for a few days and being new parents we really didn’t know anything was wrong. When I finally found out, I was devastated! It completely took the wind out of my sails. For me, it was especially frightening because it was the only thing that I knew I feared might happen to me, and it did.
Suddenly, I was parent of one beautiful but handicapped little baby girl. Early one morning I laid her on the living room floor and just looked at her while I asked God for His perspective on things. Immediately I realized that God loved me regardless of my level of perfection, or lack thereof. He loved me unconditionally and I had no right to do any less for my daughter. Second, I realized that this trial felt as though someone had taken a backhoe and dug a huge hole in my heart. I knew the hole would fill with water. The question for me was. “Am I going to let it make me better or make me bitter?” I chose the latter. I believe that the adversity had the potential to give us wisdom beyond our years if we would embrace the package it came in. So I embraced my little one and cherished each and every day of the eighteen months we had her. She died six days before Christmas in 1979 and great was the loss of her beautiful life.
Opportunity 4 – You rarely exceed your own expectations.
I often tell salesmen not to let their company limit them with their sales quota. Always set your own expectations and reach for those. The computer company I worked for used to have sales quota of four major orders per month, though the national average was 3.2 per month. I set my goal for twenty orders per month, and though I never hit it, nobody ever got upset with me for getting twelve to sixteen orders in a month. Before my first year was over I was asked to be a manager, so I never got to hit my goal and often I wished I had stayed on a little longer just so I could have hit the goal.
Another example was Jesse Owens in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. He was going for a world record and a goal medal in the long jump. On his first attempt he committed a foot fault and had to try again. He committed a similar fault the second time and only had one more opportunity to jump. He slowly walked down to where he would need to land to win the gold medal and placed a red scarf on the sand, and then slowly walked back to the starting point. Unbeknownst to him, his coach kicked the scarf a foot further. Jesse took a good run and jumped without committing a foot fault, landing right on the scarf, a full foot further than was necessary to win the gold and set a world record. I can’t prove it, but I bet he would have landed on the scarf if his coach hadn’t moved it because you rarely exceed your own expectations.
Opportunity 5 – Others see us the way we see ourselves.
When the twelve spies returned from their reconnaissance mission in Canaan, ten of the spies were spooked by the giants and said, “We were like grasshoppers in our own sight” (Numbers 13:33). They saw themselves as grasshoppers, so the people of the land saw them that way too! If you walk into a room with a confident, successful individual, others are more likely to see you in the same light also. Learn to see yourself the way God sees you. If you don’t know how He sees you, consider what He did for you in the work of the cross. You will find that the father has a profound love for you and created you with a destiny. Get a hold of that and carry that perspective into the day!
QUOTE FOR TODAY
“Each problem I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems.” – Rene Descartes
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