Disclaimer: These are my personal opinions, not the opinions of any of my firms or any organization I’m affiliated with. My writing is focused on urging business people to live creatively and generate value for themselves by delivering value to others, and to shape a better future.
There Will Always Be Opportunities
Many years ago, as a young boy, I had a conversation with my father about investments. Somewhere in the discussion, we talked about how much land prices in Makati had gone up so much, and that the people who managed to buy very early had really seen their investments pay off many times over. I naively commented, “Man, I wish I had a time machine to go back and buy up all the land!” I remember my father telling me, “David, there will always be opportunities. Learn from the past but don’t waste time wishing for the opportunities of the past. The more important thing is to recognize your opportunities and be ready to make the most of them.”
Those two simple ideas of opportunity recognition and opportunity readiness have stuck with me, and while I’m not a big fan of shameless opportunism, I do believe that an important part of growing in professional mastery requires the ability to seize the right opportunities and maximize them.
I share this story to set the stage for some quick thoughts on Independents, a type of businessperson who, regardless of employment status, has a keen sense of opportunity recognition and is well-positioned for opportunity readiness. I ended up referring to these types of people as Independents because they’re marked by three types of independent abilities:
- Independent Clarity: The ability to recognize opportunities by understanding the world with foresight, originality, and creativity.
- Independent Competence & Capability: The ability to harness opportunities with readiness, excellence, and agility
- Independent Capital: The ability to marshal the human, financial, and social resources opportunities require.
These people will find ways to thrive in all kinds of situations, especially ones that are volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous, or more popularly known as VUCA. While everyone else is seeking prediction and/or prophecy before they start moving, while everyone else is waiting and seeing, the Independents are preparing and seeking, because they understand that in volatility are asymmetric opportunities, in uncertainty are leadership opportunities, in complexity are learning opportunities, and in ambiguity are creative opportunities, chances to redefine the way things work and put together something new.
Learning from the Independents
The Covid Pandemic has certainly highlighted for me the most Independent people in my own circles, and I have deliberately increased my interactions and collaborations with them. I have also drastically lessened my consumption of news, outlooks, and reports, and increased my co-investments with Independents.
Instead of asking, “What do the so-called experts have to say?”, I want to know, “Where do the most dynamic have skin in the game? What value can I get from their approach? How can I join them?”
I don’t want my mind full of the opinions of those simply analyzing events. I want to know as much as I can about the people and organizations that are shaping events. They have more useful things to teach me about opportunity recognition and opportunity readiness. We can cut through the noise by looking at what the practitioners, particularly those with major skin in the game, are doing, not what the pundits are saying.
Conclusion: The Evidence of the Possible
As I type this, I am sitting in an airplane, a literal machine in the sky, the idea of which still blows my mind when I pause to consider the many different operations, technologies, resources, and individuals it takes to enable every single flight. I’m capturing my thoughts using a rich collection of words, organized in a widespread grammatical system, and keyed into an iPhone, that responds to every interaction with invisible computations processed by chips made out of sand and powered by electric energy stored in lithium-ion batteries developed less than 50 years ago. Right before my flight, I downloaded documents to review from a digital cloud sending broken down packets of information through satellites in space and deep sea cables to my phone, without getting lost, and in an extremely short time.
All of these concepts, when carefully considered, lead to an endless rabbit hole to explore. They should also remind us that even if many things remain challenging, complex, and seemingly undoable, chances are they will be overcome, figured out, and done.
Despite the overwhelming evidence of the possible, most still prefer the safety and comfort of the agreed dogma, the conventional view, and the artificial concept of “risk-free”. This is why most people won’t become Independent. They will live their lives dependent on someone else to give them clarity, meaning, and assurance, someone else to provide them with opportunity and value, and someone else to shape their future. That someone else will most likely be an Independent. And someday, someone will look back at their work and say, “I wish I could go back to that time when that opportunity presented itself.”
The great men and women of the future will remind them of what great men and women have done throughout history: ignore the voices of the choir and march to the beat of their own heart.