How to Find New Opportunities

There’s no need to live on unrealized potential; knowing how to choose and act on opportunities helps you grow into the person you dream of being.

There’s a lot of fear in uncertainty. But it’s uncertainty and the chaos that accompanies it that creates fertile ground for opportunities to arise. The problem is that people are so focused on surviving that chaos that they fail to take notice of the ways they can make the most of those situations.

Even when opportunity knocks, if you’re unable to hear it, how can you answer? Even when you hear it, what good is it when you’re overwhelmed with everything else? After all, life doesn’t line up events neatly for us to handle one by one. Sometimes everything falls apart all at once and we’re left to pick up the pieces. But even in those bleak moments where everything feels as if it’s lost or destroyed, well… sometimes bullsh*t makes the best fertilizer.

In this article, you’ll learn how to identify opportunities and contextualize whether or not they’re worth pursuing, what to do when you’re saturated with tons of opportunities and what to do when that well has dried up. In that case, you’ll learn how to create your own.

Know What to Look For (and Why)

Before you can make use of any opportunities you find, you need to silence all the noise. Since chaotic times are anything but quiet, you need to approach this uncertainty with a level head and clear understanding of how you want to succeed.

Start by creating clear goals, focusing on no more than four long-term (12+ month) objectives at a given time. Even if you have a lot more that you want to work on, prioritize the goals most important to you and get those done first.

From there, look for opportunities that align with those goals and perform some cost-benefit analysis. By asking a few questions, you can determine an opportunity’s risk and cost vs. the different outcomes and their payoffs.

Some questions include:

• Is this opportunity tied to a trend (for instance, if the event that caused it is resolved, does the opportunity disappear)? 

• How fast do you need to move to make the most of this opportunity?

• Do you have the skills necessary to get the outcome you want? If not, can you learn them or find someone who does?

• What are all the potential outcomes of the opportunity?

• What is the outcome if you fail trying vs. the outcome of not taking the opportunity?

Remember, when looking for opportunities, contextualize them with your goals. While one opportunity might seem interesting, if it doesn’t move you closer to any of your goals, it’s just busy work. With that in mind, new opportunities can also cause you to reassess your goals — for instance, losing your job during the pandemic might have been the push you needed to become self-employed.

Think of the relationship between goals and opportunities as steel sharpening steel; goals are your destinations on the road map to success and opportunities are the pathways to get you there.

Too Many Choices: Dealing with Choice Paralysis

But what do you do when there are too many opportunities, too many lines on the map criss-crossing and zig-zagging to the point of making the path forward unreadable? While it’s great to have choices, too many can be overwhelming.

Here are a few ways to choose the best opportunities from a list of too many:

• Prune your list: the most straightforward option is often the most effective; identify the opportunities that have the best cost-benefit analysis, the most relevant to your immediate goals, and ones that you can act on relatively quickly. Either forget or put the other opportunities off to the side and revisit them once you work through your current ones.

• Identify the opportunities that engage you the most: which ones are the most fun, most valuable, or grab your attention best? As long as they move the ball forward, the opportunities you have an affinity toward can potentially be the easiest ones to complete.

• Take one day at a time: you don’t need to do everything all at once. Instead, focus just on what’s in front of you. The more you zoom out, the easier it is to get overwhelmed. There’s time for strategy later. Now’s the time to work on the things within reach.

• Break tasks down into smaller parts: if you’ve done everything above and still feel overwhelmed, break those tasks into smaller steps to the point they seem brain-numbingly easy. Often times, the hardest part is getting started. Make getting started and continuing after as easy as possible to build momentum.

Too Few Choices: Creating Opportunity

On the other hand, what do you do when there aren’t any opportunities worth pursuing? Waiting is a perfectly feasible option, especially if you have other activities to occupy your time. But if you have a lot of energy and free time or starting to feel restless because you’re not moving towards your goals as well as you’d like, you can make your own opportunities.

Here are a few ways to do that:

• Look for disruptions: the world is always in flux, especially with how readily social media and a 24/7 news cycle highlight every little bit of chaos. Get in the habit of tracking and interpreting trends and practice identifying ways to solve problems. For instance, with so many people losing their jobs during and after the pandemic, I pivoted my business model to serve those people directly and help them get back on their feet, giving rise to Mad Mage Consulting.

• Talk with friends and listen to their problems: while it’s always good to look out for those you care about, notice patterns about what people are worried about. Are they talking about problems you can potentially solve?

• Fix a problem you have: conversely, what are some things that you’ve been struggling with that you know others are dealing with too? Is this solution something you can easily scale? Not only will you improve your life, you stand to improve the lives of everyone who’s in the same boat.

• Spend time creating: whether it’s content or physical goods and services, create and share what you’re doing on your favorite platform. Focus on having fun and, if you’re consistent, you’ll end up attracting people who vibe with you and what you’re doing. In turn, they might present interesting opportunities, whether through sponsorship, collaboration, or something else.