Philosophy on Facebook # 49 – Opportunities

This note I am currently writing is coming to fruition after soccer tryouts so hopefully this post will make some sense but bear with me if it turns out to be a stream of consciousness. Anyways, after realizing everything that is available to students as we grow older I felt like it was important to recognize everything that we are giving the opportunities to do. Google will reveal that opportunity is essentially defined as something being a possibility due to a favorable combination of circumstances. The word circumstance is so key when speaking about opportunities because if they are optimal then they can make anything possible. The main problem with making things happen is setting up the optimal situation for which they can happen.

I have this one belief that everyone put in their positions is there because they are the best for that certain spot in life. I believe that there will always be people who we love to hate and will not get along with society very much but I believe that if anyone else were to be in their positions they would be much worse and more of a danger to society than they already are. For instance, there will always be people like Paris Hilton’s or other people who are thought to be menaces to society but I feel like if anyone were to take their spots they would be even greater menaces. I think everybody is the best at being themselves and if anyone would try to take their spots it would just turn out so much worse. You are the best at being you and you should keep it that way and not try to act like others. If you do so the opportunities available to oneself increase dramatically. The reason I wanted to explain this belief is because I feel like we always say stuff like “Oh what I could do if I were in their shoes.” While it might be pretty great to be in Bill Gates shoes having almost unlimited amounts of money available to you, I feel like Bill Gates is the best person to be in his situation and deal with the many opportunities he has made for himself rather than somebody else. I think it would be really awesome to have all the money I could ever need but I feel like it is more important to live your own life rather than fantasize about someone else’s making it easier to open opportunities.

Opening up opportunities is a huge part about becoming a better person and improving your current life. The more opportunities you have, the more chances you have to succeed in them thus directly relating to the amount of success you will have in the future. I feel like one of the most important parts about opportunities is your environment. As I have wrote about before, (check out the first philosophy note I ever wrote) your environment is such a huge part in almost everything you do in your life, and opportunities are no exception. Your environment basically sets you up for what you are fully able to accomplish. Like the potential note I wrote before, you are basically limited by what your environment allows you to do. You may be the smartest person in the world capable of solving world problems but if you aren’t given the opportunities to do so then all your potential and skill won’t be put to good use mainly because your environment didn’t allow for it to happen. Unfortunately there are so many factors in life that you can’t control especially things that deal with your upbringing and where you are born because these are situations where you don’t have much power or much say in the outcome. Normally fetuses can’t choose if they get rich parents or not. Regardless of what you can’t control, you usually have control over one thing and that’s your response to the situations you go through. You will almost always be able to control how the way you and the world interact by how you choose to deal with all the different events that happen to you. One view point, and in my opinion the best way to deal with life, is the belief that things will always turn out better than they will now and being optimistic about your life. As you probably know if you have read my posts in the past, my view on life is that you must leave the world a better place then when you leave it, or at least lay the framework for better things to happen after you’ve passed on. The best ways to make this happen is to be optimistic and actively search for opportunities that allow for improvement through experience. If you do so you will naturally and gradually set up situations for this to occur. This means that you must try to take advantage of everything that comes up and you also must go out of your way to try and find something that interests you.

You will always benefit from these attempts and excursions of finding what’s out there. At the very least you will find what isn’t right for you and in a sense, weed out what isn’t good for you. For instance, if you take up a summer internship or check online for a job at the zoo because you are interested in animals, it will benefit you in so many ways. For one it will provide you an opportunity to get up close and personal with your interest areas and expose you to all aspects involved in the particular subject. If you really like animals but hate cleaning up after them, you will at the very least realize that being a zoo keeper isn’t for you or that your love for animals doesn’t transfer into a career. There are so many variables involved in every situation that you can’t say that a specific opportunity will help you in a specific way but you can’t really afford not to try it and find out. The more opportunities you have, the more experience you will accumulate. The more experience you have the more things will become available to you thus basically snowballing into even more and more opportunities. The main purpose of opportunities in my opinion is that they allow you to find the perfect way to live your life. No one can tell you the right or wrong way but you need as much exposure and variety as you can get to make choices that fit perfectly in your lifestyle and interests.

I think an important time that is closely related to opportunities is college. Now that most of us, if we haven’t already, are approaching a time where so many more opportunities are going to pop up for us. College completely transforms your environment and gives people the chance to discover more about themselves than ever before. In the process we will be undergoing so much change and so many new things that it will seem like you are a totally new person than ever before. The important way to look at this is how it will affect your life. There is always a chance that things can turn out good or bad. To ensure that they will be the best as possible you need to make the most out of what you have. If you give it 100% whenever you apply yourself in activities it will only benefit you. People will take notice to your efforts. The more that you apply yourself, the more opportunities you will be given the opportunity to participate in. If you make the best of what you are given then the more doors that will be open for you which in turn will open even more. The more opportunities you are presented with the more opportunities you will be able to participate in the future. It is essentially a cycle where you will be introduced to more and more. Like I said before, some may be good and some may be bad but it is much worse to regret what you never did. As time passes, you will see more and more but you can’t go back. You need to take advantage of as much as you can while you can in the here and now. Missed opportunities could hold a world of success in store for your future but you will never know until you take them. It is important to live in the present and realize here and now what you can do and doing so will only help you in the future.

-Allan Nicholas