fortuna's favourite child

Thinking about what it takes to be an opportunity magnet

When I was a kid, I did a lot of origami, more to keep my hands busy than anything else. Like most things you experience as a child, I could only understand the deeper significance of it once I grew up and learnt to peel back layers. I find it super interesting that, for many people, a piece of paper is just that — a piece of paper. But for those who do origami, there’s an opportunity in each square: cranes, flowers, geometric shapes waiting to be coaxed into existence. I feel awe, and I feel pretty similarly when I see the work of sculptors, those who see angels in marble and carve to set them free. The paper is as it is, and so is the stone, until perceptive eyes see the opportunity they hold. 

I’ve met a lot of people like this, who see life through the eyes of possibility. Even more so because I work in tech, which is pretty much a playground for some of the most entrepreneurial spirits around. It usually feels like they’re having a different conversation with reality that others can’t participate in. Honestly, I sometimes catch myself wondering if these people are just incredibly lucky — Fortuna's favourite children playing dress-up among mortals. How else could it be that they look at ordinary circumstances and see extraordinary opportunities and grab them with both hands?

But as someone who also rationalises a lot, there’s still a huge part of me that believes opportunity-spotting is less about random chance and more about crafted consequence. They say that fortune favours the bold, but I've come to believe that fortune also favours the observant. I wouldn't call myself bold, for example, or someone who snatches possibilities by the neck and bends them to my whims. And yet, I've found myself in situations and places I never could have imagined, simply because I've learned to keep my eyes open and my mind receptive. Writing, going to college in England, almost all of my meaningful friendships: they’re all things I found when I doggedly followed a signal of opportunity.

I think there's a certain magic in this kind of attentiveness. It's like I’m tuning into a frequency that's always been there, but I’ve only just learned to hear. Suddenly, I start seeing connections everywhere. This reminds me of a conversation I had with a very entrepreneurial friend, who told me that the most successful ideas weren't about having a perfect plan, but having perfect attention.

Perfect attention. I've been turning that phrase over in my mind ever since. What would it mean to cultivate perfect attention in our lives? Not in the anxious hyper-vigilant way, but in a state of relaxed awareness?

Sometimes, it's the aftermath of major life changes. An upheaval that rearranges the world overnight almost always reveals pathways that we never noticed before. COVID19 was that for a lot of us. It’s not everyday you come face to face with mortality, but suddenly we were confronting it almost everyday. The busy roads I travelled on everyday were eerily empty, and the constant noise of kids playing and cars merrily honking was replaced by an unsettling silence. I’d interact with the rest of my world only through a six-inch screen, feeling smaller and more fragile than ever before. 

Opportunity lurks in the residue of intense emotions. A joyful experience leaves the world saturated with possibilities. I've felt it after grief too, and even after anger. In those moments when you feel raw and exposed, you are also strangely receptive to new perspectives and life-altering decisions (radical haircuts and all).

But I think it’s reductive to assume opportunities only come in the wake of a seismic shift. If that were always the case, we wouldn’t have people who spot opportunities and make use of them in a way that makes others say, “that’s so obvious! Why didn’t I think of that?” But we do. So I think there’s something else at play: The most intriguing opportunists I've met don't need problems to enhance their alertness; they're alert even when everything is rosy. It’s a state of perpetual readiness. It's like they've rewired their fight-or-flight mechanisms to create a sort of binocular vision, seeing both the immediate reality and the potential futures all at once.

This binocular vision isn't just about seeing more; it's about seeing differently. In my previous essay, I wrote that the most dangerous aspect of tunnel vision isn't what you miss; it's the illusion that you're seeing everything. I wonder if we're making the same mistake when we look at opportunities through the lens of what we already know how to do.

I was reading about evolution the other day, about how new species don't emerge because the old ones got really good at what they were doing. They emerge when life becomes more complex, to adapt to something new in the environment. Legs are reflections of gravity, lungs of oxygen. I can't help but think about opportunities the same way now. The really big ones, the ones that change everything, aren’t usually about doing what we're already good at, but better. They're invitations to become something new entirely. It's like they're daring us to grow a new limb, to learn to breathe in a new way.

This is what I think the real trick is for those people who seem to spot opportunities everywhere. They're not just really good at what they do. They've figured out how to not take their knowledge and skills for granted. It's like they've found a way to shake off that mental inertia, the tendency to see new information through old filters. They have a remarkable perceptual acuity that helps them notice subtle changes or anomalies in their environment that others might overlook. They can switch between different mental frameworks with ease, and filter out irrelevant noise from relevant signals. It's this flexibility that allows them to reorganise ideas into new sequences, to make connections that aren't immediately obvious to others. Strong mental models, loosely held.

There’s a world of difference between frantically searching for something specific and being open to discovering something you never knew you were looking for. In a way, it reminds me of those Magic Eye pictures that were popular when I was a kid. At first glance, you see a flat pattern of colours and shapes. But if you relax your eyes in just the right way, a 3D image emerges from the chaos. That's what opportunity-spotting feels like, I think: learning to look at the world in a way that reveals the opportunities lurking just beneath the surface of everyday reality. 

All of this doesn’t matter if you’re not in the right frame of mind. Even the most obvious opportunity can be ignored by a person who isn’t motivated to see it. Anxiety, for example, is antithetical to opportunity because every nerve in your body is screaming at you to retreat, retreat, retreat. Laser focus on a goal doesn’t help, either. Your world contracts, your vision narrows to a pinpoint of immediate concerns, and anything that comes out of the left field is either ignored or batted away in annoyance. You are constantly running away. 

Opportunists, on the other hand, seem to have an internal compass that points not just away from danger, but towards growth. I like to think of it as a trusted partnership with their own intuition, but they use that not to be constantly on guard against threats (like a lot of us). Instead, they're attuned to potential gains, to growth, to what could be. The noise of fear is drowned out by the ringing signal of opportunity.

I think of all this as I walk through my city, a city full of opportunity for those who can spot them. Maybe Fortuna doesn’t play favourites after all. Maybe she’s simply more visible to the attuned, the flexible, the innately curious. I think this is what it takes to be a finder of opportunities: a willingness to look at the world with fresh eyes each day, to hold our knowledge lightly, and to remain open to the whisper of possibility in the ordinary.

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