May 26, 2026
Opportunity Is Not the Rare Part
We talk about opportunity as if it were rare. A door that opens once, briefly, for a lucky few. That framing is comforting, because it removes responsibility. If opportunity is scarce and random, then not having one is not your fault.
I have come to believe close to the opposite. Opportunity is not the rare part. Recognition is.
In the framework I write about, opportunity sits in the middle, between preparedness and action. I put it there on purpose. It is the hinge. Preparedness is what you build before you know why. Action is what you do after the moment is obvious. Opportunity is the narrow window in between, where the thing is present but not yet labeled, and most people walk right past it.
Here is why it gets missed so often.
Opportunities rarely look like opportunities in the moment. They look like extra work no one asked you to do, an awkward introduction, a problem the room is avoiding, a role you do not feel qualified for. The clean version, the one that looks obviously good, usually only appears in the retelling.
Recognition also depends on preparation you did earlier. You see what you have trained yourself to see. The person who has spent years around deals notices the shape of one forming. The person who has not sees noise. Two people can stand in the same room and only one of them registers what is happening.
I think about a few turns in my own path this way. Moving into energy development, taking on operations and legal work at a startup, building a firm of my own. None of those were doors that swung open dramatically. They were closer to side entrances that looked like more risk than reward at the time. What made them opportunities was not that they were rare. It was that I was positioned to recognize them and willing to walk through before it was comfortable.
And recognition without action is just a nice observation. This is the part that stings. You can see the opening clearly, describe it well, even tell your friends about the thing you should do, and still never move. A recognized opportunity you do not act on is functionally the same as one you never saw.
So I have stopped asking whether I am getting enough opportunities. I have started asking a harder question. What is in front of me right now, disguised as something inconvenient, that I am too distracted or too comfortable to recognize? The answer is usually sitting in this week, not some future one.
Read Chapter One
The opening chapter is free. Judge the rest from there.