How many opportunities do we miss every day simply because we are convinced that they don’t exist?

It doesn’t bother me that I didn’t know the tunnel existed. What bothers me is that I was so utterly sure that it didn’t. I had even wished for one, knowing that the grocery store, the local video rental shop, a Subway, and a Starbucks would all have been within easy walking, or at least biking, distance, had it not been for the harrowing race across highway 74. But as I was certain that no such avenue existed, I had never gone looking for one.

Part of the problem in this case is that there are pedestrian bridges over highway 74 to the south, closer to the main shopping district. Having seen the bridges there, and seeing no bridges here, I assumed that I had all the information available. No bridges, no access. It never occurred to me that local planners might have provided other methods for crossing the highway in other areas. This leads us to opportunity rule number one:

The opportunities we know about are not our only opportunities.

Here’s another interesting part of the problem: as much as I wanted pedestrian access to the other side of highway 74, I did nothing about it. It turns out that it existed all along, but I didn’t know that. Assuming that no such solution existed, I accepted my fate and took the car instead. I didn’t make even a single phone call toward asking what it would take to create a pedestrian walkway in my neighborhood (a phone call that would have revealed that we already had one). This is why we say that necessity is the mother of invention. I had the option of driving, so I didn’t look for a better way, which leads us to opportunity rule number two:

When you don’t like your opportunities, create new ones.

Of course, this can be easy to say but hard to do. When we’re caught up in the belief that there are no other opportunities, it’s hard to get past that belief. We have to turn it from a belief into a possibility, so that we can begin to look for other possibilities. So here are two great habits to try to get into. First:

Frame your desired opportunity as broadly as possible.

If instead of thinking “I wish there were a bridge across highway 74,” I had been thinking “I wish there were pedestrian access across highway 74,” I might have been more open to looking for something besides a bridge. And second:

Include the possibility of change in your opportunity assessments.

In wishing for that bridge, I never allowed for the possibility that either reality or my knowledge of reality might change. I didn’t think, “There’s no pedestrian access that I know of,” or even, “There’s no pedestrian access yet.” I just thought, “There’s no pedestrian access.” Period. End of thought process.

I think we get caught up in this kind of fatalistic thinking because we are used to a mental model of the world that projects our current state through both time and space. However “things are” feels like how things will always be and seems like how things must be everywhere. It should be obvious, upon reflection, that neither of these ideas is true. So why don’t we live this way?

I think our stumbling block is summed up nicely by a line from “The Truman Show,” in which Jim Carrey plays a man who is unaware that he is living within a Hollywood set. Ed Harris plays the director responsible for creating this illusion, and when asked how he has managed to perpetuate the illusion for so long, he says, “We accept the world as it is presented to us.” So I leave you with this thought:

Do not accept the world as it is presented to you.

Decide instead how you want the world to be. Then do your best to create it.