The Luck of the Prepared Mind

I was recently reading a post of Nelson’s where he was talking about developing yourself and not losing sight of your goals just because you’re focusing on your day-to-day existence. He made some very good points, which you can read about here.

His biggest point was that the only way to keep your dream alive is to actually do something, that just wishing and hoping isn’t enough.

He’s absolutely right.

Having said that, I do want to take a jump sideways and look at both serendipity and the so-called ‘power of positive thinking.’

Serendipity has an interesting history, being a word coined by Sir Horace Walpole from a fairytale called The Three Princes of Serendip, and referring to the kind of good luck that leads to making beneficial discoveries by accident.

It’s what my mother calls ‘The Luck of the Prepared Mind.’

Her take is very simple: Good luck is everywhere, the trick is recognizing it.

People don’t always recognize opportunities when they see them. One thing that ‘positive thinking’ can do is keep your mind open to the possibility. It’s always easier to find something if you’re looking for it.

Here’s an example: I have been a science fiction fan for most of my life. I really enjoyed reading anthologies of short fiction from the fifties and sixties, and still read some of the magazines to this day. Anyway, one of my great desires was to get some of the old magazines, preferably from the fifties and earlier if possible.

I looked for them when I could, and most of my friends knew I was interested in collecting them.

One day a man went into the used bookstore where a friend of mine worked, and commented that he had some of those magazines and nowhere to store them. My friend knew the store owner wouldn’t want them, and this was before eBay. So he called me up and gave me this man’s number.

I got another friend and we went over there together, figuring we probably couldn’t get all we wanted, but we could probably get at least some for about a hundred dollars each (all we could really afford at the time.)

The guy didn’t want money. He just wanted the magazines gone. My friend and I got three car loads of magazines for nothing more than the price of dinner, and we had to convince the guy to accept that.

I don’t have the magazines anymore– I sold them a few years later to finance a move– but that doesn’t matter.

What matters is that the only reason I got to own and read and enjoy those magazines was because I was looking for them. I was looking and ready to find them.

It’s the same way with a lot of other things. If you convince yourself it’s not there, you are never going to find it. You won’t see the opportunity when it stares you in the face, reaches out and tweaks your nose.

If you convince yourself that all you can find on sites like oDesk are low-paying jobs, then that’s all you’ll find. If you don’t believe you can win the good jobs without bidding very low then that’s the only way you’ll get the jobs.

You need to have faith and confidence in yourself, and also believe that the good jobs are out there. Once you know they’re there, you just have to recognize them when they come up.

Believe in yourself and opportunity and hard work will take you a very long way. Don’t believe in yourself or opportunity and nothing will ever change.

Keep your eyes and mind open.

If you have any similar stories feel free to add them in the comments. It’s always a morale-builder to see how other people have succeeded.

ShareThis