Opportunity

When I was fifteen, my uncle told me this.

He was seated opposite me at the kitchen table with his arms cross as he was speaking in a serious tone, as though giving me the best advice ever.

Once in a lifetime is opportunity knocking, said he. "Just once. And if you miss it — that's it. Gone forever."

I believed him for years.

And that belief — that one single idea — made me more afraid than anything else in my life ever did.

The Waiting

Because of what my uncle said I spent a long time waiting.

Waiting for the big moment. The clear sign. The one obvious door that would swing open and announce itself as the opportunity I had been saving myself for.

I turned down small things because they didn't look big enough. I said no to uncertain things because I was saving my one yes for the right thing. I watched other people try and fail and told myself that at least they had wasted their knock — mine was still coming.

I was twenty three. Then twenty five. Then twenty eight.

The big obvious door never came.

What came instead were small things. Quiet things. Ordinary looking chances that I kept walking past because they didn't match the picture in my head.

I was waiting so hard to get an opportunity that I did not see that it had been there with me all the time.

The Thing Nobody Told Me

This is what I should have been told to the contrary.

Opportunity does not knock once. It knocks constantly. Every single day. In ways so small and so ordinary that most people never recognise it for what it is.

It knocks when someone casually mentions they need help with something you happen to be good at. It knocks when a plan falls through and a gap opens up you didn't expect. It knocks in the boring Tuesday afternoon meeting when someone asks a question nobody else wants to answer.

It knocks quietly. Without drama. Without ceremony.

And because we are all waiting for something louder — we don't hear it.

I didn't hear it for years.

The Day I Finally Understood

I was thirty one when it hit me.

I sat in a coffee shop and was waiting to have an appointment to attend which I did not want. The man next me was talking on a cell phone. It was loud that I could not avoid listening to it.

He was a small business owner. He was frustrated. His content was a problem, his site, his emails, the words that represented his business. He was not aware of where to go to find the right person. He hung up in an irritated manner and sat looking at his coffee.

I had been writing for years. Not professionally. Just for myself. A blog nobody read. Notes in a journal. Words that never went anywhere because I never sent them anywhere.

I looked at him. He looked at me.

I said, and I cannot yet believe that I did this, I could not help overhearing. I might be able to help you."

He stared at me for a second.

Then he said — "Sit down."

What Came After

That conversation lasted forty five minutes.

I worked with him for eight months. He referred me to two other people. Those two people referred me to others. Within a year I had built something real from nothing — from a single sentence in a coffee shop that I almost did not say.

That was my opportunity.

It didn't knock on a door. It didn't arrive with a sign or a signal or a feeling of certainty. It was just a man on a phone call and a moment that lasted about four seconds before it would have disappeared completely.

Four seconds.

That is how long most opportunities actually stay.

What I Know Now

I called my uncle after that first year. Told him what had happened. How it started.

He was quiet for a moment.

Then he said — "Maybe I got that wrong."

Maybe we all do.

We spend so much time protecting our one knock that we stop listening for all the others. We build this idea in our heads of how opportunity is supposed to look and feel and arrive — and then we stand at the window waiting for something that was never coming in that form.

Opportunity is not a grand event. It is not a single moment with your name on it.

It is a hundred small moments every week — most of them quiet, most of them uncertain, most of them easy to ignore.

The difference between the life you have and the life you want is simply this.

Learning to recognise those moments.

And finding the courage to say something.

Even when your voice shakes.

Even when you are not sure.

Even in a coffee shop talking to a stranger.

Especially then.