To be successful in your business, you need to capitalize on opportunities as they present themselves.
And you want to be successful, don’t you?
Taking decisive action is important if you want to capitalize on opportunities.
It helps if you’re clear about what you want and where you want to go. We’ve discussed aspects of this in several previous blog posts.
It also helps to have a view of your money and time as a means of self-expression and creation.
I Let Time Slip Away
When I was a kid, I loved the TV show Sea Hunt and was fascinated with the idea of scuba diving.
As time passed, there was always a reason why it wasn’t the perfect time for me to learn how to scuba dive and to get my PADI certification. PADI, the Professional Association of Diving Instructors, is “the world’s leading scuba diving training organization.” With a PADI certification, you can dive pretty much anywhere in the world for the rest of your life.
Around 2003 I took a seminar that had me delve into my beliefs and attitudes about money. I came to realize my family has a view of money as a scarce resource that is to be conserved and very cautiously spent. I know the roots of it are from my depression-era parents, who came from very little.
An outcome of the seminar was that I shifted my attitude about money from scarcity to one of investing money as a means of self-expression and realizing my dreams.
What Caused Things To Change?
Why do I mention this? Because soon after I completed the seminar, I had the opportunity to take my sons on a vacation to a Club Med resort at Columbus Isle in the Bahamas. It was a big deal and unlike any vacation we’d ever taken before.
I picked this location because I wanted to give my sons the treat of this type of vacation and so my older son could go scuba diving. He’d gotten his PADI certification several years earlier as part of a scouting scuba trip.
We went to the club dive shop to arrange a dive package for my older son. They told me they had a 4-day program that would get me and my younger son PADI certified. The time commitment left us adequate time to enjoy the resort and the cost was less than if I did the more arduous certification at home, which involved 10 weeks and a certification dive in a cold murky quarry (vs. the beautiful Caribbean).
In times past, I would have told them I needed to think about it and then agonized all night long making calculations and trying to justify the expense. This time, I was absolutely clear I wanted to realize my own life-long dream and to give my younger son the gift of this certification. I signed up on the spot and over the week we both became PADI certified.
I’d never before decided so quickly about something that involved this type of investment level. It was a huge breakthrough for me.
The last 2 days of our vacation, all 3 of us went on some amazing dives together. My sons still talk about that trip as the “best vacation ever.”
And Since Then…
Since then, we’ve gone on several other amazing scuba vacations together and I’ve been on a number of additional dive vacations on my own and with buddies. It truly shifted what was available to me for vacations and I’ve loved every single dive I’ve ever taken.
One memorable dive my sons and I did was a night dive with the manta rays off the coast of Kona, Hawaii. The mantas are over 15 feet across and as we nestled on the ocean floor 25 feed down, they made huge swooping loops from the surface and down to the bottom over us. They came so close you could touch them. It was a magnificent experience and none of us will ever forget it.
My sons just got back from a dive vacation in Cozumel, Mexico. My younger son arranged it as part of celebrating my older son’s college graduation. Of course they had a wonderful time.
That trip and all our others wouldn’t have been possible if I hadn’t decisively capitalized on that opportunity years ago to get certified. Amazing how one thing leads to another!
What Are Your Opportunities?
What about you? Are you clear about what you want and where you want to go? What opportunities are arising for you? Are you ready to jump and take advantage of them? What new paths might open up for you if you said yes?
Drop me a note or post a comment here and let me know.
Eric
