Opportunities

Opportunities are like waiting for a really fast and elusive train, with just one seat.

Life is made up of choices and coincidences. The better your choices, the less you need to rely into coincidences to become successful.

Imagine you need to go somewhere, but the only way to do so, it's by taking a train that happens to go across your hometown once. Literally once. You don't know when, you don't know where the station is, but you have to take that one train.

The first natural task to accomplish, is to find the station. The train might take a while to arrive, but you need to be there when it does. There is no other way. You will have to figure out how to find the station. You may want to walk randomly, and there's a chance you can find the station that way, but it's too risky.

Then you will find out that you're not the only person that's looking for the station. There are several more. Some of them will have clues, help, any kind of advantages you can imagine. You will think it's unfair, but doing so won't help you reach your goal.

Let's say you develop a set of skills that lets you reach the station, before the train arrives. You're there, right in front of the railroad. Then you look to your left, and you realize you're not alone. You're actually late in the party, but the train hasn't arrived, so you can cool down for a little.

You may be worried now. Maybe you just went in the wrong direction, and are now waiting in a station of a train that won't ever arrive again, together with people that's unaware of that nonsense. Then you try to calm down.

But this particular train won't let you catch your breath. You'll be able to listen it coming sooner than you'd expect. Everybody will start running towards the train. There will be people faster than you. There will be people riding a jet-pack and you may find it unfair, but that won't slow down their rockets nor the upcoming train.

In that instant, you’ll notice that a selfish company built an inconvenient train, that has just one seat and no brakes. It just won’t stop for you to go aboard, take a seat and read a book. It will be rushing to a place that’s far away.

The faster ones will go ahead of you. You will watch them fail. But every failure will just reduce the amount of candidates, until there’s one that grasps that unique seat. You won’t be exempt of failure, like anyone else; and that will be the source of unbearable fear and emotions kicking in.

No more than two heartbeats will separate you and the train in that instant. You will think about all the effort it took to reach that station, and the required amount of nonsense required to build such an awful, yet so desirable, train. But that won’t make your movements faster nor more precise.

And you will jump. During a single amount of time you will be suspended in the air. And, most likely, you will trip and fall. Because that’s how life is.

While lying in the ground, you will be able to see someone else having a seat. That’s for sure. It might be one of those jet-pack users, or maybe just someone that arrived there by casualty. And all the time you’ve spent preparing will come to your mind: all of that wasted effort. And you will realize the backpack you’re carrying constrained your movements and that you weren’t born with legs that are best suit to jump into fast moving trains.

But, feeling pity of yourself won't take you anywhere. In won't bring back any opportunities to travel to that wonderful place where realization lies.

It'll be sad. However, deep inside of failure lies a chance of refining your station seeking skills. To get up and learn about jet-packs, about jumping, about trains and inconvenience. To broaden your world and uncover all of the elusive railroads that really few people can follow to success.

Remember: no matter what you did well or wrong. No matter what the excuses are. What will be written in history is whatever you've achieved during your lifetime.

So, are you going to hop in the train? Or are you going to watch it leave once again? It's up to you.