Opportunity

Other people have some pretty great perspectives

I sat down to write about something that was bothering me last year, and realized something important: of all the opportunities out there for getting more business into Slant, we actually get all of the ones we need. Simple. Positive. And exactly the opposite of what I was thinking right before I landed in my chair.

Other People’s Perspectives

Just after having started with Slant, and working on a couple of intense projects, I shifted my headspace into looking for more and more business. I started talking to more people so I could establish a better network of contacts. After a couple months, it seemed like people started “knowing” that I was around to offer services and increasingly I was getting emails about possible projects. This was exactly what I was hoping for. However, I missed a lot of those opportunities.

For one reason or another, I wasn’t able to keep up communication with potential clients and the idea got shelved, or the work went to another company. As a new employee, I was kicking myself a bit because I felt like I wasn’t doing enough to secure more business and revenue. As a business owner, I was kicking myself because the lack of increased revenue meant that I wouldn’t be able to hire people, or expand the business, or create healthy growth. Etc.

A few weeks ago I sat down and made a list of subjects I wanted to post about on Medium, and this was one of them. Over the last few days I’ve been thinking about a couple of key missed opportunities last year, and how I would write about them.

Now. I just got back from a coffee, dropped my ass into my chair and opened Medium to start typing away. But, I still didn’t have a good sense of what it was that I wanted to say about missing opportunities. So, I did a search on Medium for other people writing about the same thing.

There’s a lot of posts. And having read them through I learned a few things and actually changed my mind about my own perspective.What I thought I wanted to say was something like:

“Opportunities come and go and I’m fine with that”
or
“Its just not possible to take on all the things you want to take on”
or
something else that would be positively reassuring

What I ended up finding were a bunch of posts that basically said the same things, over and over and in different contexts.

Effa S.

Effa S. has a pretty good post with the excellent title “Opportunities will be missed: and will forever be whined about” which make me immediately think that I didn’t want to whine about my problems. The article’s perspective is about relationships and missing the connection with someone else. But, I read it from the perspective of the “other person” being a client, and the relationship being the “product” that I could have delivered. I thought, this makes sense from my perspective as well. Then Effa ends the article like this:

“Stop the pity party, it’s pathetic.”

Done. I’m not writing about pitying myself for missing contracts or business.

“Jump”

The second article I read through was Justin Kemmerling’s When It’s “Jump”: How to have less missed opportunities. About how to navigate an opportunity so that you can tell yourself, logically, that you missed it for a good reason. What resonated with me was how he thought that he missed a fantastic opportunity because he “was too focused on a project [he] didn’t enjoy.” As a reaction, he came up with a checklist that he follows to justify to himself when and when not to jump on an opportunity.

This made me think of a specific one for myself last summer, where I was too absorbed to respond to a potentially nice project and it fell through. But, with this little shift in perspective it became clear that I wasn’t ready to take on the other project because I was too busy (even with something that wasn’t great). I don’t have a checklist, but for me at the time it just didn’t fit and I didn’t make the effort to follow that lead.

I already have my own checklist: my gut.

Next article, please.

Hoover on Receipts

With a positive spin on someone else’s missed opportunity, Ryan Hoover brings a nice bit of insight in his article “Emailed Receipts: A Missed Opportunity: Receipts shouldn’t be so sterile. They’re an opportunity to delight.” In it, Hoover introduces a way to take some existing business process and tweak it for a more positive outcome.

This is actually a really nice article about using boring montly receipts as a way to communicate better with one’s clients. And though its a far cry from what I might want to see or do at Slant it made me think of this:

missed opportunities can be a source for creativity and new design thinking

Very nice Ryan. Very nice.

Stigma

A little further out of field for me was Kamaran Holt’s article “Stigma: Missed opportunities” within which she makes an interesting point about the Church and the interpretation of scripture. Shifting the subject towards how I think things should be happening at Slant, her perspective makes a lot of sense:

We have a terrible tendency to place a negative stigma on anything that does not fit a narrow interpretation of [how things should be happening in business]

I think this is really well put. She goes on to talk specifically about scripture, and what happens in the Bible, but her point is clear. She is concerned about the possibility of being stalled by expectations of things needing to be perfect, and the wisdom of her concern can be easily paraphrased as:

How many opportunities are people missing because the time and the circumstances are not perfect enough for their convenience?

Holt is definitely on the same side as I was right before I sat down to write. But, that doesn’t mean that I have to feel bad about missing opportunity, so much as the next time one comes I can run with it without having to have everything line up perfectly so I can capitalize.

Fair enough, thanks Kamaran.

A Story of Appreciation

I read a lot today, and by far my favorite article was “The Opportunities I Would Have Missed: A story of appreciation.” by Kira ✨. The article is a reflection on an essay she wrote of the same title, and in it she describes how for her gifts of intelligence, motivation, family and music. In particular, she writes:

… if there was not a major deliverance in my life, none of the advantages I wrote about would have been possible…

For ✨, the deliverance that led to her many amazing opportunities was the day she was adopted from an orphanage in China and, with her new loving family, brought to America where she has lived out her life with “a sense of identity, values, morals, faith, and appreciation.”

Many people have a terrible tendency to associate a negative connotation with missed opportunities; especially in business, and even more especially when it comes to startups. On top of that, some people even view a positive spin on missed opportunity as an excuse or a weakness.

I may have missed a few opportunities last year. I may have been able to increase our bottom line. I may have been in a better place now that I currently am… and, all that other horseshit that I keep thinking to myself.

Being able to write like this is itself a unique opportunity. I work with some amazing partners and together we have a strong company that is growing at just the right pace. We take on projects when we need and when we can, we turn down many others (or let them slip by), and at the end of the day we are stable and healthy. We have some projects in the works that could grow into something really amazing, and that’s where we are focusing our efforts.

A missed opportunity here or there means I’m less distracted by what’s really important.