We all have a tendency to think a lot about the past, lost opportunities in the past specifically. The comforting factor about thinking in the past rather than in the future is that everything is certain. Nothing that happened in the past can ever change, nothing can happen otherwise. Its easier, almost effortless then for anyone to form logically sound opinions about the past.

What we don’t realize is that almost all such analysis never helps us in becoming any better decision makers. At best, such thinking doesn’t help at all. At worst, it creates a superficial, convenient layer of reasoning which justifies our indecision about investing in the opportunity to ourselves.

Seems counterintuitive, doesn’t it? I thought analysis was good.

Well, the title of this essay is only a misnomer. It very clearly implies that you saw the value in something before it was general knowledge, that you had identified an opportunity but couldn’t act on this knowledge because of some external, uncontrollable and unreasonable factor.

In hindsight, its always easy to look at something and see the trend. The challenging and rewarding part is to take the leap, to believe in your idea, to take the decision, today.

Opportunity, by its very definition is not something that everybody agrees upon on. In fact if everybody does, then it most certainly isn’t an opportunity.

The term “missed opportunity” neglects the fact that a majority of the times you didn’t even see the opportunity when it was around.  The phenomenon should much rather be called “unseen opportunity”, that would be a lot more accurate.

Next time when you talk about how you missed an opportunity, think about this.