Choosing your opportunities

One of the hardest things to look back on for me is lost opportunities. The so called 'lost opportunity cost' is about all the times you said "no" when in hindsight you found out your should have said "yes". However, we can only look back with this higher certainty, and looking forward, the future remains largely opaque.

Unless

People look forward in time to anticipate and seek to constrain the future. But our ability to do it is limited by the information and models we have available to us, and by our own inadequacies.

I have demonstrated many inadequacies in my past, and I try to share them with others in the foolish delusion that they might avoid my mistakes by my describing them. But in truth, I have come to believe we are all limited by our nature and nurture. For example:

• Honesty vs. optimism: I imagine a future that is brighter than the present, from the perspective of my view of what is better and worse. And I share my vision of the future with others, to greater and lesser extents depending on my relationships with them. But I was brought up with what I call "the engineers disease", which I have discussed in other articles, and is summarized by the compulsion to make certain that the down-side possibilities are made clear to the 'customer'. And that limits sales to those willing to knowingly take the risks (uncertainties about the future - good and bad), as opposed to those who, not knowing the risks, might proceed to their great benefits.
• What you are willing to lose vs. gain: Lots of research has been done about whether people are more willing to lose what they have or gain what they don't have. These are generally posed as situations where you can do one of two things, and where the mathematics say they are equal or one is better than the other. It turns out avoiding loss is favored over attaining gains. Many articles and studies are available on this, but even for many/most those of us who have read them it's still true.
• How much you have: One of the things these studies seem to miss, in my readings of them, is how much you have. It's easy to say you are willing to lose all you have on a 50-50 chance to quadruple it (the actual break-even point in most of these studies is about this) when you have nothing, but hard when you have worked hard for what you have and would suffer greatly from losing it. And for people who have millions of dollars, $1,000 seems like it's not much, but for people who are trying to make next month's rent, it seems like a lot. And you don't get to try that bet from the same situation again and again. That's why the winner of the first big hand in a poker game has a big advantage.
• Your sense of loyalty: This is one of those things that it really strange. Some people will not break a promise almost no matter what, and others will make and break promises all the time. Some people are transactional in nature, not recognizing a past or future, while others will regard the history of a relationship as more valuable than the transaction at hand.

There are a lot of other things to look at, but I hope you get the point.

Opportunities are all around us all the time

I am very fortunate in that I have about 100 companies per month providing opportunities for me, and of course this is just opportunities to work with them for what they are working on. But that also means that I am losing most of those opportunities every month because I cannot say "yes" to all of them. I am willing to bet that if I made better choices I would be wildly successful at whatever it is those opportunities represent. And I believe this because of the lost opportunities I have had in the past.

But it's not just me. Most of the people from companies that present also have many opportunities in front of them, including doing other things with their time than trying to create and grow companies.

Imagine that instead of this activity, you decided to get a job that pays enough to live on and spending all the time and effort on the other things in life. Do you imagine anyone looks back on their life and says to themselves I wish I would have spent less time on the things I love and more time on the tough things I did for so-called success?

If do what you love, you will love what you do...

or so the saying goes... But is it true? I love to laugh, but if I laughed all the time, I would not keep loving it as much. I love novelty, but I also take comfort in the things I I know and enjoy. There is a balance in this world between different priorities. And the real trouble I have seen with executives I have worked with comes when they forget that balance and become obsessed with 'success' of their venture over their ethics, their families, their health, and their humanity.

In many ways, life is about choices. You can make them regardless of your situation, and your choices and outlook rule you life.

Who do you want to be?

I am good with my choices, even those that worked out poorly or could have worked out way better. It's not that I would make the same ones again knowing what I know now. It's that the past is past and I was who I was and am who I am. I have changed in many ways and in many ways I am the same. And you can change or stay the same in many ways as well. And you can do this at any time.

It's not 'what' you want to be, it's 'who'! Your views, your thoughts, what you are and are not willing to do for what purposes, your guardrails, your views and willingness to share them, how you interact with others and think of yourself, and every other aspect of who you are.

In our periodic calls with scores of different people who have largely never met each other, I am more interested in getting a sense of who you are than what you are doing. And conveying that to me in 30 seconds or less while introducing yourself and your company is core to the first impression you make. But while you cannot make a second first impression, feeling as if you have failed because of my response to you is a big mistake. Some of my best friends are people who I initially disliked.

Conclusions

Stop trying to be perfect, especially in the eyes of others, and start trying to be the best version of you that you can be. We all make mistakes, and we all have chances to do better next time... until we don't.

More information?

Join our monthly free advisory call, usually at 0900 Pacific time on the 1st and 3rd Thursday of most months, tell us about your company and situation, and learn from others as they learn from you.

In summary

We all have an enormous number of opportunities all the time. And we can never perfectly predict how they will come out. So we do our best with what we know and how we think at the times we have decisions to make. Instead of seeking to change the past or obsessing about it, a better strategy, in my view, is to figure out who we are, who we want to be, and try to change into our better vision of ourselves.