Developing The Ability to Spot Opportunities

In life — and especially in a professional context — we tend to admire and envy individuals who are good at spotting opportunities, and capitalising upon them.

In business, there are typically a wide variety of different considerations that need to be taken into account at any given time, with the specifics varying depending on the particular field you’re operating within.

If you work in the mining industry, making sure you have high quality stackable core trays may be very significant, for example. Whereas if you work in digital marketing, it’s important to be able to generate favourable SEO outcomes through high quality and original content.

In all cases, though, the ability to spot opportunities that others may miss can be very beneficial and can lead to you having the professional edge, as well as a more professional and personal journey.

Here are a few tips for developing the ability to spot opportunities.

Develop a breadth of perspectives by doing many different things over time

Spotting opportunities tends to have a good deal to do with being able to consistently “think outside the box,” and being able to think outside the box has a lot to do with being able to see things from a range of different perspectives.

Individuals who have a great breadth of experience — such as comes from having worked on many different projects, across a number of different industries and disciplines — will tend to be much more insightful and dynamic in this regard.

Look for opportunities to develop yourself in new directions, professionally speaking. Work in different fields, take up different projects, and broaden your range.

Get in touch with your intuitions

Intuition always plays a role in the ability to spot and capitalise on opportunities. Although this doesn’t mean that you should automatically follow your “gut feeling” in every professional situation, it’s certainly a good idea to learn to identify your “gut feeling.”

Getting a bit more in touch with intuitions can be as relatively straightforward as slowing down every so often and checking in to notice how you feel — physically and emotionally — about a particular path you’re on, or a situation that you are confronted by.

It’s also important to develop the skill of differentiating between the kind of internal resistance that comes from nerves or lack of self esteem, and the kind of resistance that comes from feeling that a particular path forward isn’t a good idea for more substantial reasons.

Make a point of being action-oriented by and large

Opportunities tend to increase and become more apparent the more active you are, as a whole.

When you are more action-oriented, in a general sense, you will tend to create more opportunities as you go along, while at the same time obtaining more valuable hands-on feedback that can help you to refine your approach to things, and to reevaluate whether or not your previous assumptions hold up well in practice.

By not taking action at all, and instead sitting around and trying to find the perfect moment, however, you’ll tend to lose more opportunities that you create.