Grab it when you can

When I was a budding sales engineer, my manager told me a story: A shoe manufacturer sent two salespeople to a town to explore market opportunities. When the salespeople arrived, they made a discovery: Everybody there went around barefoot. One sent a message to his boss: “Regret advising. Absolutely no opportunity. Nobody wears shoes here. Coming home.” The other also sent a message to his boss: “Unlimited opportunities. Nobody has shoes here. Get ready 10,000 pairs. Staying here awhile.”

The second of the salespeople was certainly more successful. He could see an opportunity. To salespeople, an opportunity is any situation in which they can offer a product or service. To a student, it can be a chance to go to Silicon Valley for an industry attachment, to join an Ivy League university or to strike an attractive deal with a potential employer.

When would these situations arise? The situations will depend on whether you are fully aware of the world around you, and whether you choose to see opportunities arising.

Let’s conduct a simple experiment. What do you see when you look at the following? 2 + 3 = 5 4 + 3 = 7 3 + 3 = 8 9 - 5 = 4 10 - 3 = 7 If you found that 3 plus 3 does not equal 8, congratulations! You have seen, like most people do, that one of the sums is wrong. But that’s not the only answer you could have given. From my perspective, I can also see: 3 occurs five times 2 occurs once 4 occurs twice 7 occurs twice there are four even numbers and four odd numbers. What am I driving at? If you chose to see only the wrong-sum aspect, this will automatically become your focal point. If you chose to see both that and the other positive and/or interesting aspects I have illustrated above, then you’ll have more opportunities with which to work.

Opportunities are all around you. But opportunities only exist once you identify them, and they will only be identified if you look for them. The reason why many opportunities pass us by is a perceptual one: We do not see an opportunity for what it is.

Think about the shoe story. Both salesmen were presented with the same situation. Opportunity was waiting for both of them, but it was the second salesman who saw—and took—the opportunity. From now on, whenever you are looking at the people, places, things, events, happenings and ideas around you, ask yourself two important questions: What do I choose to see? Where do I direct my attention?

Instead of seeing opportunities, some people see obstacles instead. Obstacles are often things or events or people that we have to deal with every day. How we tackle them define us. If we adopt the stance of a victim, they will impede our life. It will seem like the world is not fair, and we are likely to give up easily. If we look at obstacles as opportunities, a world of interesting ideas suddenly opens up for us to find a way through.

In both cases, we have the same intelligence and resources. The difference is, in the case of what I would call the “opportunity mindset,” we are tapping into all our intelligence and resources to explore a solution. In the “obstacle mindset,” we begin to focus on reasons why we can’t succeed and then give up readily. To put it more succinctly, an “opportunity mindset” is the understanding that, oftentimes, perception is reality. This means that an experience in itself is neither good nor bad—it is what and how you perceive of that experience that counts.

It is interesting to note that the Chinese word for CRISIS is composed of two characters, the upper one represents danger, the other represents opportunity. Take a look at your own life, and reflect: What obstacles are holding you back? How can you convert each of them into an opportunity? List 10 ways you can make the most of each opportunity. The power of the mind is strong; why not cultivate an ‘opportunity mindset.”

Here are some useful strategies and techniques for you:
* Stay alert and activate all your senses, especially your sense of sight.
* Be curious about the world around you.
* Learn to see it from many different perspectives.
* Observe patterns in everything you see.

One way to know for sure that the Singapore economy is not doing well is to observe, if you are travelling on the Benjamin Sheares Bridge, the pattern of cranes at the container port. (They are all standing still like a pack of giraffes.)

Seek out novelty, or look for new ways to do things. A local businessman, George Kwek, together with his wife, a professionally trained baker, experimented thousands of ways to make bread exciting. They started the talk-of-the-town BreadTalk chain of bakeries.

Be playful and ask questions. A playful staff at Singapore Zoo threw a question while brainstorming: Why don’t we open the zoo at night? The Night Safari, the first of its kind in the world, was then born. Generate alternatives for as many outcomes as you can.

It was reported that Thomas Edison went through some 10,000 filament alternatives before he successfully invented the lightbulb. Ask yourself how the situation would look from a different perspective. Read widely. Reflect often about what you are doing.

Lee Say Keng is a knowledge adventurer and technology explorer for Optimum Performance Technologies.

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