From the Inspirational Thought Unit
I've been thinking a lot lately about what direction to take my career in the coming months and years. There's a lot of opportunity out there and it's hard to parse out what's practical and what's going to be a waste of time.
One thing I'm trying to balance out is making opportunity vs chasing opportunity.
The difference is an opportunity you make is usually born out of passion, and an opportunity you chase is usually born out of desperation.
My friend put it succinctly:
"A project born not from passion but from opportunity may bear fruit but it’s almost always bitter." -Kohl Glass
On the flip side, I've done passion projects that have borne very little fruit, but boy was it sweet fruit.
Listen, I've got 5 kids and a mortgage so I'll take any fruit. But I just worry that chasing too much opportunity actually limits the amount of lasting success one might have in a career. James Clear looks at it this way:
“If you spend too much time working on good things, then you don't have much time left to work on great things.
Understanding opportunity costs means eliminating good uses of time, and that's what makes it hard.” - James Clear
The trick then is to set aside enough of yourself to work on projects that make opportunity so that those projects have the sunlight, nurturing, and fertile soil they need to make a ton of sweet fruit.
-Jake