Of late like an aging fisherman my thoughts have been turning to the ones that got away. Opportunity comes to most of us & I guess what defines us is our response.
I was a solid but unspectacular football player on the fringes of a very good class team. I remember an epic clash in a semifinal of the school tournament where the winner was overwhelmingly tipped to become the champ. As a defender I was assigned to man-mark one of the opposition stars & spent the game harrying him from end to end (get between him & the ball or between the ball & the goal). Suddenly I found myself at the end of a loose ball with their goal in sight & my brain froze. "I am not a star & no way I should be the one scoring" - I made a feeble pass to one of our forwards in a much worse position than I was & long story short we ended up losing the game on penalties. Some opportunities are like that - we don't grab them because we may not believe that we deserve that chance.
Forward a few years - I was accosting unsuspecting foreigners at a well known Handicrafts emporium in Bangalore for a tourism related summer project when I met an opportunity in disguise. A guy walked out with hands full of bags - I introduced myself as an MBA student on a survey mission & offered to help him with his bags as long as he answered my survey. He agreed & we talked on the way to his car. He then asked me about my background & interests & we talked for a fair while. I learnt that he was looking to start a chain of country clubs in India & wholly unexpectedly he then asked me if I would like to join him as one of his first people in India ? I did what I thought was the smart thing & rebuffed him saying that I had to complete my MBA & was not ready to start working yet. A few months later I saw a piece in a business magazine identifying him as the scion of a Hong Kong tycoon & talking of his grand plans for India. Clearly recognizing an opportunity for what it is calls for skill that I perhaps lacked at the time !
Around the time I completed my MBA in the early days of the internet I was among a couple of people from the class offered a chance to get on board a very small company that had visions of making it very big. At the time I had just snared one of the higher paying jobs on campus & this offer of a significantly smaller salary boosted by the promise of "ownership" did not seem to measure up. I was just starting out in life & had visions of my own - all of them with Re spends associated with them & I convinced myself that what I needed was cash in hand then & not at some indeterminate time in the future. Needless to say that company went on to become the definitive success story among Indian internet based businesses & I sometimes do wonder "what if ?". This is not necessarily regret - I accept that there are times when one is just unable to make that leap of faith !
I am hoping that instances like these have taught me to recognize opportunity when it knocks (or rings) & to open up. Oh wait, looks like someone's at the door...
