How to Prepare Yourself for Future Opportunities

“Chance favors the prepared mind.”

Do you agree with the quote above? I definitely do. Instead of believing in pure luck, I believe that luck is what happens when opportunities come to those who are prepared for them.

To increase your “luck factor”, there are two things you should do:

1. Prepare yourself for opportunities so that you can take advantage of them when they come.
2. Put yourself in a position that makes it easier for opportunities to come.

While both of them are important, I think the first one is more important. Why? Because what makes the difference is whether or not you can take advantage of the opportunities. What’s the use of getting a lot of opportunities if you can’t take advantage of them?

So, because the first point is more important, I will focus on it here.
Preparation Takes Time

There is one important characteristic of preparation that you must understand: it takes time. You can’t prepare for something big overnight. In fact, bigger opportunities require bigger preparation. Just think about the level of preparation it takes to go to the Olympics. Those who want to go to the Olympics must prepare themselves for years, often from an early age.

That’s why it’s important that you prepare for future opportunities. Don’t wait until they come before you start preparing for them. It would have been too late by then. Prepare yourself early and you will be ready by the time they come.
Three Ways to Prepare Yourself

Here are three ways to prepare yourself for future opportunities:

1. Be curious

Curiosity makes you eager to know more about the world out there. If you are curious, you won’t be satisfied with what you already know. You will want to know more. As a result, you will see more potential opportunities.

It’s like being in a building with windows. The more windows the building has, the more you can see what’s out there.

2. Educate yourself

When you find something interesting, start educating yourself about it. Don’t worry if you can’t do anything about it right now. Remember, you are preparing for the future.

In my case, there are a few things I’m interested in which I still can’t work on at the moment. So what I do is I educate myself about them.

For example, I have a dream that someday I might have a game studio. As I wrote in Eight Random Things About Me, I often wrote simple games when I learned computer programming. Who knows, perhaps I could have my own game studio someday. While that might still be years away, I start educating myself about it so that I would be ready when the opportunity came.

So educate yourself in whatever it is that you find interesting. Read blogs, subscribe to magazines, watch videos, read books. Build a “prepared mind” that luck favors.

3. Build an “opportunity fund”

Warren Buffet makes sure that Berkshire Hathaway has at least $10 billion in cash in reserves. Why? So that when the opportunity comes for an attractive deal, Berkshire can immediately act on it. If they didn’t have the money, the opportunity could be gone forever.

Similarly, you should prepare an “opportunity fund.” Prepare certain amount of money that you can use to take advantage of the opportunities that come your way. Don’t let opportunities slip by just because you don’t have the cash to act on it.

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