Are you ready to switch off your screens and ponder or discuss another writing/conversation prompt during dinner tonight? You want to know about my thoughts on it? Here’s my take:
Wouldn’t it be great if we always saw every single possibility in every opportunity that offers itself to us? Come to think of it, wouldn’t it be great if we recognized every opportunity as such AND the possibilities it enfolds? Yet, we have to rely on our instinct. And then, we have to make the best of what we think is a possibility.
Instinct. A gut feeling that is ignored all too easily. Especially when we are feeling peer pressure. And peer pressure is everywhere. Only around the turning of the year I saw so many indie authors proudly post their sales figures on whichever platform. As if the sales of one year meant that it will continue like this. What if it doesn’t? Or what if these numbers make others feel ashamed of what little they sold. Do numbers mean a thing in the long run? Will they outlast our lives? What possibility lies in a number? Yet, so many of us are in for the number competition.
How much easier for those who are much younger or less experienced to fall for what seemingly offers big possibilities? The big dream often equals the big money. And how easily can that be a trap! Ask me how many times scammers approach me to offer me an “in” on Hollywood movie producers for my books if only I dunk 10,000 dollars into the effort! I know people who paid that money to give their books a shot at making them into a movie. Did they succeed? Did it get them anywhere? And those scammers on the other end – does this really mean big money for them or do they have to share their scammed cake and end up going for more? They all grasp the seeming opportunity without seeing the possibilities. Possibilities may be failures, as well.
Not seeing the possibilities of a situation or of an opportunity is like being blindfolded AND fettered. Because it is in our power to take these blindfolds off and explore the possible outcome of a situation or an opportunity. In either case, we may or may not be able to achieve a change if we put in the effort. But in seeing the possibilities, we can do the math if in a 50:50 approach – taking or leaving it – we can be on top of it or not and whether we are willing to pay the price. Seeing a possibility enables us to make a choice; not seeing a possibility is like being without a will of one’s own. Exploring the when’s, if’s, and how’s is part of approaching a situation or opportunity. To accept or challenge the outcome, that’s the possibility beyond the opportunity.
You already know that I have a colorful past of a work life starting in my mid-teens. At one point, literally on the same day, I got two job offers – one was that of becoming an agent at a renowned yacht charter company that might have had me travel around the world. The other was that of becoming a journalist. One was a role that would have appealed to my organizational and people skills; the other did both, plus my aptitude and hankering for writing. The first offered me a fixed salary with benefits and promotability from the first day; the second was a freelancing job without any promises, the salary depending on the number of lines I would write. Which opportunity would YOU have taken and why?
Of course, you know I took the second opportunity. Not because I was so very adventurous, but because I looked down the line in what would be twenty years down from where I was at age 25. Which possibilities waited there for me? I doubted very much I would have ended up as the wife of a millionaire, sunbathing on the deck of a super-yacht (I imagined the boredom of that and decided that money wouldn’t even make up for this very unlikely possibility). I’d more probably wilt behind a desk dreaming of the big, wide world while selling trips to customers who really went all the way. But I KNEW that writing would always make me happy, that it would never be boring, that I could make my own niche whatever lay in wait for me in THAT job.
In the end, some of the possibilities I saw came true. Some that I never anticipated added to these. If I’d never seen the possibilities in the second offer, I’d never be where I am now. Not sun-bathing on a super-yacht, of course (which still is no dream of mine). But, every once in a while, bobbing up and down in a small vessel on the Sound during summer while dreaming up the next book doesn’t sound too bad, does it?
Leave a Reply