reading the water

Unpacking the shape of an opportunity

Sep 30, 2024

I haven’t done much fishing in my life, but I have watched many people sit patiently by the water, hooks in the water, a bucket of bait at their feet. I learnt that experienced anglers don't just cast their lines randomly and pray for good luck. They "read the water", looking for subtle signs that indicate where fish might be hiding or feeding. They observe ripples on the surface, the way water flows around rocks, even changes in the water’s colour.

I like to think that spotting opportunities is a lot like reading water. To the untrained eye, it seems more like a game of chance and luck than anything else. But to those who fish regularly, it’s about attuning yourself to signs of an adjacent possible that is hovering just outside the edges of the present moment.

That said: like the anglers, you have to know exactly what to look for.

The first shape of opportunity, I think, is that of an annoyance. Ideas that feel irrelevant, paths that feel impossible, ruptures in linearity that feel too disruptive. We tend to brush these annoyances off or get irritated when they show up, but a little reframing tells us that they are a knock on the door inviting us down another path.

Another signpost towards new opportunities is momentary discomfort: that nagging feeling when we face information that doesn't fit our existing mental models. It's the mind's way of showing us a gap between what we know and what we’re encountering, a cognitive itch just begging to be scratched.

Our instinct to avoid these irritations is deeply ingrained. We're wired to seek comfort, to stay within the boundaries of what we know and understand. It's a survival mechanism, really—stick to the familiar, avoid the unknown. We like our lives to follow a straight, predictable line. It's comforting, after all, to see the path ahead clearly marked. But life rarely adheres to such neat linearity, and neither do the best opportunities. The instinct that kept our ancestors alive can now keep us from truly living.

So when we come face to face with discomfort or annoyances—those deviations from our expected linear path—we stand at a crossroads. The choice is between dismissing the dissonance and clinging to the familiar, or embracing it as an opening to expand our life. What happens when we don’t reject the idea immediately? We get a moment to identify the beliefs or assumptions that are being challenged. Are they based on solid evidence, or simply habit or deep-rooted fears? What are they showing us in the mirror, and why does it make us uncomfortable? That split second between stimulus and response is often ringing with potential.

It’s pretty hard to give your attention to annoyances and momentary discomfort, wired as we are to seek safety in linearity. But linearity itself can be one long obstacle. When you focus only on one goal, you develop tunnel vision and inevitably dismiss all the opportunities that don’t lie in that linear path. You’re thinking, I want to shoot this arrow and have it cut clean through the air and hit the bull’s eye with precision. You’re thinking about making one possibility a reality out of a million. The most dangerous aspect of tunnel vision isn't what you miss; it's the illusion that you're seeing everything.

I’m reminded of dating apps, which sell the idea of opportunity but function purely on linearity. You sign up expecting to find the perfect life partner, and swipe left on anyone who doesn’t fit that criteria. You dismiss the very real possibility that the person who could truly shake up your world might not fit into your neat little boxes, and might be hiding behind a profile you'd normally dismiss without a second thought. There's a certain irony in how we might be swiping past the very people who could challenge us, complement us, and help us grow.

I think this dating app mindset seeps into other parts of our lives too (or perhaps software learns from life?). We craft mental "profiles" of what success should look like, what friendships should be, what skills matter. Then we dismiss anything that doesn't match up, potentially missing out on experiences that could reshape our understanding of ourselves and the world. In reality, opportunities are spotted when you stop demanding what that opportunity should look like.

Most opportunities are rarely obvious or direct. They are weak signals, foggy in their potential and promising very little. The shape of opportunity is fluid and unpredictable. They might be one step removed, or seven steps removed from the moment that makes you think “aha! I knew I made the right move”. They index heavily on your faith in them and yourself; only if you have faith will you take the first step in that new direction. All of this makes them very easy to miss.

I’ve come to realise that recognising opportunities for what they are calls for more than just keen observation; it needs a fundamental shift in how you perceive and interact with the world around you. It’s not an easy shift, or a comfortable one. But honestly, any growth demands that we become strangers to our former selves, and any change is a kind of betrayal. Change is the price of opportunity.

I think seeing opportunities around us1 begins with more than just engaging with dissonance. We're giving ourselves permission and priming our vision to see the world differently. Paradigm shifts are earthquakes in our mental landscape, shaking the foundations of what we thought we knew and rebuilding our understanding from the rubble.

Think of it like swapping out an old, scratched pair of glasses for a new prescription. Suddenly, the world snaps into focus. You find yourself wondering: Has the world changed, or have I? The answer, of course, is that the world has always been this complex, this ripe with adjacent possibles and shadow futures. The water has always been this rich with fish. The only difference is that now, you can see them all.

This is part one of a series on how to spot opportunities and expand your life. In part two, I plan to explore the prerequisites for finding opportunities, the ones that separate those who always find black swans from those who let them slip by, unnoticed.

Opportunities can also be created in a process of extraordinary discovery, but I think that's a different ball game altogether. I want to focus, right now, on the art of recognition rather than creation. After all, what use is the ability to create new opportunities if we're blind to the ones already at our fingertips?