Opportunity

you already have it

About a year ago, I opened YouTube and one of the top suggestions was a video with a couple hundred views, recording a roadside hawker selling parathas somewhere in Pakistan. The video stayed in my memory because it was a girl, probably in her late teens, making these parathas on firewood, the whole place filled in smoke, during the day. She probably will never get an education, the rest of her life was most likely to be pre-determined and severely limited in potential because of forces outside her control.

This isn’t an exception. Over a billion people live in multidimensional poverty - meaning they don’t have access to things as simple as drinking water, nutritious food, basic education, or even a place to live. A person living in this situation had their fate virtually sealed when they were born.

But if you’re reading this post, it’s likely that you live in a situation similar to me. You have access to the basic necessities, and even luxuries (a smartphone, a comfortable place to live, money to spend, and more).

For the most part, I think that’s all that matters if you want to do almost anything. Yet we complain of what we lack. Not enough time, not having the right degree, not having sufficient saved - I’ve personally been guilty of more than one of these in the past. What primarily changed my perspective was reading biographies of historically significant people who didn’t come from a background very different from mine. Benjamin Franklin, PV Narasimha Rao, Steve Jobs - they had relatively normal beginnings, they had their setbacks, but they persevered through it for a very long time.

So if I have access to opportunities similar to them, what’s the difference? It’s those years or decades of blood, sweat, and tears, in pursuit of a goal with very low but non-zero odds. But the last part is all that matters - non-zero odds. That girl making parathas in Pakistan would perhaps kill to have those odds.

The thing is, you might not even end up where you initially aimed. Your goals will shift, opportunities you never imagined will appear, and you might achieve something completely different than what you set out for. But none of that happens if we don't recognize and take the opportunity that we have.

If you could see 100,000 different possibilities into your future and see 2 cases where you achieve your wildest goal - isn’t that good enough to give that our absolute best shot? We have the opportunity, all that matters is if we’re willing to take it and follow through relentlessly. That’s what I’m going to do.