Qualities: OPPORTUNITY

The great secret of success in life is for a man to be ready when his opportunity comes.
––Benjamin Disraeli

The door to opportunity is always labeled ‘push’.
––United States Air Force

If a window of opportunity opens, don’t pull down the shade.
––Tom Peters

There are people who say that all you have to do is work hard enough and you can get ahead, but you can spend your whole life working your tail off and, if you don't have opportunities, you're never going to get ahead.
––Rep. Linda Sanchez (Dem. California, Mexican Parents)

Successful people don’t wait for the knock; they create their own opportunities: They widen cracks in the wall; they beat down doors; they travel unfamiliar roads; they take risk; they imagine or see things other do not; they change weaknesses into opportunities to improve; they change difficulties into opportunities to excel; they take failed people or organizations and instill them with their spirit of success; they change themselves so they can meet the challenges spread like a universe before them.
––John Roberts

There are so many opportunities, and such limited resources. So, finding or creating opportunities, and developing them into success, is more a matter of selection and priority and matching them with capability. It is an enjoyable management problem, made more interesting by freshness and the demand for imagination and vision.

The great cultures of the modern world have endless opportunity and upward mobility. In the last 15 years, half of the world’s population has converted to a market economy. Socialism and state managed economies are dead and gone. Now, you can change your class or your wealth or your image overnight. It works in reverse, too. India and China are converting hundreds of millions of poor people into a middle class simply because they have opened the door to individual growth and opportunity. Even Islam, in some countries, is learning to trust its women to drive cars and hold jobs and seek opportunity and equality long denied.

In America, more than most countries and business cultures, you have the opportunity to fail. You can start a business and, if it does not succeed, write it off and try again. There is no great stigma for having given it a shot, the American dream, the spirit of the entrepreneur, the wide open spaces waiting, waiting…. It is almost too easy, not enough experience or capital or partners, go ahead anyway, what have you got to lose except a little seed capital and think of what you will learn for next time. You can even go bankrupt, forget all the bills, and in a few years the system writes the slate clean and you can start over before a lifetime is gone.

If your entrepreneurial dream succeeds, there is the stock market, go public, make a million. Most countries don’t have either the small stock investors or the consumer market for the new products. America provides the system, and the rest of the world is learning what a powerful economic force it is––more fun and greater possibilities than working for General Motors. All you need is some guts and money and an idea.

Opportunity, at a higher level, is the essential ingredient for success. To survive, you have to find the Great Idea or the Golden Moment or you may not be able to live with the competition that does. Opportunity is only the beginning, the development or discovery of an idea that has a brief shelf-life before the advantage is gone, before someone does it bigger and better.