Opportunities. Do you really know what you're looking for?

A note before you start: this piece runs long, and it goes philosophical in places. That's deliberate - it's the lens I've been finding most useful lately. Read it and you won't regret it. It'll give you plenty to think about.

Open, and not sure what for

I spent the past couple of months doing what I'd call re-discovering - mapping my strengths, my interests, what I actually want from what comes next, and why the obvious paths didn't fit. Coming out of it, I found myself open, poised, looking for the right opportunity. The category was obvious enough - a new role, project, or even better - a mission. But then a surprising problem showed up: how would I actually know if one was right for me? Asking around, I wasn't the only one without a satisfying answer.

Everyone had a different image of what this opportunity should look like - from intuitive ("you'll just know") to deliberate ("here are the criteria") to contrarian ("don't go where everyone else is going"). But quite often the conversation quietly skipped the what and landed on the how: searching, networking, creating momentum. Harder, faster, the more the better.

Then there is someone close to me who was doing none of it - not searching, or pushing. No active effort but rather content with his situation. And yet, drawing on signals from his network and his own thinking, he found himself working through an idea. It surfaced on its own. Some blocks started fitting. I watched it happen, advising along the way.

What his case revealed is that the opportunity didn't arrive randomly. It came to life around something specific to him - his knowledge, his attention, the particular relationships he'd built, what he'd been quietly paying attention to for years. Not everyone in his position would have seen it. Someone else, same signals, same moment - nothing.

That is not luck. That is something we don't have a good name for yet - and something we almost never talk about when we talk about opportunities.

"It just happened" is what people say when they can't explain it. I don't accept that. I want to know.

There is a particular feeling that comes before understanding - an unsettling sense that something is there, just underneath, that hasn't been named yet. It pulls at you. It won't sit still until you go looking. And when you find it, when the pieces settle, there is a peace to it - not excitement exactly, something quieter. Things reorganise. The view clears.

I had felt it before. I was feeling it again.

We've inherited a whole set of answers about what drives opportunity - effort, timing, network, skill. We carry them without examining them. But these are the conditions that lead to opportunity, not opportunity itself. They distort the view, so let's set them aside.
The real question is simpler and harder: what is the essence of opportunity?

Spoiler: it's the person.

Sounds counterintuitive, right? An opportunity feels like something out there, external, waiting. How can the person be its essence?

I'll leave this hanging here for a while - and first look at the literal meaning of opportunity, before I disagree with it completely.

What we get wrong about opportunity

The word itself is telling. "Opportunity" comes from the Latin ob portum veniens - coming toward harbour - the favourable wind that carries a ship safely to port. The wind arrives. You receive it. The opportunity is something that happens to you from the outside.

Modern versions of this are not so different. Either the opportunity exists out there, waiting to be found - and the skill is in spotting it before others do. Or you make it happen through effort and action - you push until something opens. Find it or make it. Both still treat the opportunity as something external, something the world either hands you or withholds.

There is one assumption underneath all of this that hardly ever gets questioned: that the opportunity exists independently of the person who sees it. That it is the same thing regardless of who is looking.

It isn't. And that changes everything.

An opportunity cannot be defined in absolute terms - it is relative to context, to practical concerns, to interest. It doesn't exist independently, waiting for whoever passes by with the right timing or the right hustle. It comes into being in relation - between a situation, a person, and the world they are part of.

This is why an idea and an opportunity are not the same thing. An idea is just a possibility - it can sit untouched for years, available to anyone. An opportunity is that same possibility, now tangible for a specific person, at a specific moment. Same idea, different person: an opportunity for one, nothing for another.

This is also why effort matters but doesn't decide whether an opportunity appears. The same idea a year earlier wouldn't have become an opportunity. He wasn't yet who he is now - and that, not the market or the timing, made the biggest difference. People develop. Ideas develop. At some point, the two met.

The question nobody asks

So where does this constitutive relation between person and opportunity come from?

It comes from what you are actually reaching for - what matters to you. It doesn't need a precise definition. But without it, the world stops speaking to you.

And here is the uncomfortable part. Most of us treat what we want as settled. But ask someone to describe it directly - a non-superficial answer is surprisingly hard to find. We tend to fall back on a definition we absorbed - from family, from the professional world we operate in. We have used it so long it feels truly our own.

Whose criteria are you running?

The direction that decides what you can see as an opportunity can itself be compromised. I'd call it contamination of the view - and it happens in different ways.

Some environments do this more aggressively than others. The startup ecosystem is among the most systematic I know. Heidegger had a term for this kind of anonymous authority - das Man, the They. Not a specific person or institution. The collective voice of a field that defines what a real opportunity looks like, and makes questioning that definition feel like a failure of conviction.

In the startup world that voice is very loud: scale, disruption, funding, growth. So loud that many founders lose access to their own question - whether any of this is actually what they want.
I've seen this up close, mentoring founders. The hardest cases aren't weak ideas. They are founders who can no longer ask whether this path fits what they actually came here to do. When I ask - what is it you want to achieve, and is this the best way to get there - the room often goes quiet. That quiet says more than any answer.

Prejudice is the second form of contamination - defined as judgments formed by past experience and applied forward as permanent truth. A founder who pitched to large corporates early, got no traction, and concluded that corporates don't buy from startups - full stop. His conclusion was valid at the time, but it created a prejudice that stayed with him even as the situation changed. It operates before assessment begins, closing off possibilities before they can be examined. What's really sneaky about it is that we treat it as our own intelligence - the thing we trust most. Learning from mistakes is supposed to make us sharper. Sometimes it does the opposite. Our own judgment can work against us.

Let's make something clear: there was never a pure self to corrupt. You were always shaped by the world around you. The question is not whether you were influenced by contaminating forces - you were, and always will be. The point is not to remove them. That isn't possible. It's to understand them, examine them, and become aware of which ones are still deciding for you without your knowledge.

What the head misses, what the feeling gets wrong

Say you've done that work - you understand your direction, you've cleared the obvious contamination. You still have to recognise the opportunity when it actually shows up. And that recognition happens on two different levels.

First, you try to recognise the opportunity logically. Does this fit where I am going, what I can actually do, where I am right now? This is the layer most people work on - frameworks, criteria, deliberate assessment. We trust this process because it feels quantified and reasonable.

The second recognition is emotional. The immediate sense of rightness or wrongness, excitement or alarm. Do I like it, do I feel it's good for me, am I excited about it? It is tempting to treat this as intuition, or even something spiritual. But it does real work - processing pattern, context, resonance faster than deliberate assessment can.

Both layers can be contaminated. The logical one runs on your criteria - if they are corrupted, the whole assessment is too.

The emotional layer is more deceitful. Das Man's voice, absorbed deeply enough, starts to feel like your own. You feel just as right about criteria you've adopted as you do about criteria you'd call genuinely yours. Almost impossible to tell the two apart.

Which makes the whole emotional layer feel unreliable. Understandably. But that's not quite the right conclusion.

The alarm and the excitement don't work the same way. The alarm — the sense that something is off - tends to be specific. It points somewhere. Follow it and you usually find something concrete, a particular thing that doesn't fit. That is useful. That can be examined.

One clarification: the alarm going off doesn't mean walk away and don't look back. Quite the opposite - take a closer look, understand what triggered it, weigh it properly, and only then decide

Excitement is less reliable as a guide. It can be recognition of a real fit. Or you can feel right about just part of the opportunity, and that feeling covers the parts that don't fit. You are still responding to something real - just not all of it. It's a kind of "good enough" case, except you never realise you've accepted the unfitted shortcomings.

Excitement also tends to hold over time. And that can be misleading and hard to catch - it can be accurate at first and simply never get re-examined. The fit was real. Then it stopped being real, and nobody told the excitement.

I saw this happen to people building an investment fund, and I was close to the process - advising as it went. The excitement was real - and at the start, so was the fit. They committed fully: time, money, relationships. Then the fundraising dragged on, far longer than planned. Commitments came in, but never enough to close. Each setback got read as "almost there," not as a sign to step back and look again. The harder question - is this still the right path - simply stopped getting asked.

From where I was standing, the gap between the original opportunity and what it had become was visible. From inside the excitement, that gap was very hard to see.

When the two layers disagree - something feels wrong but looks right, or feels right but won't survive honest scrutiny - that divergence is rarely noise. It is the most important signal in the whole process. Something real hasn't been examined yet.

The cost of seeing clearly

Doing this honestly is uncomfortable. Predictably so.

The first discomfort is isolation. Stepping outside the obvious options reads as defection before it reads as clarity. You are not revising your strategy. You are exiting a shared picture of what reasonable looks like.

The second is uncertainty. We are trained to justify decisions externally - the numbers, the market, the consensus of reasonable people. Accepting that no opportunity is objectively good, only good for you, means losing that ground entirely. You cannot prove it to anyone. You can only know it yourself.

The third is responsibility. Without external proof, the judgment is yours alone. The consequences are yours alone. If it goes wrong, there is no consensus to share the weight with. You chose it. Fully.

Left unexamined, none of these just hang around - they become another form of contamination. They are the price of choosing to see clearly. Feeling them means the work is real.

I know all three from the inside. For the past few months I have been turning down opportunities that were real - available, easy to explain, legible to everyone around me. I am waiting for something I cannot yet fully describe. Something that requires alignment between what I am moving toward and what the world brings - another person who understands what I am trying to do, a problem that fits, a moment where the two meet.

Learning to sit with these discomforts without being consumed by them - and without going so numb that they stop signalling - is harder than it sounds. I am more practiced at it than I was. That is probably the most I can say with confidence.

I cannot manufacture what I am waiting for. I can only be honest enough about my direction that I recognise it when it arrives. It is not a comfortable position. But it is the one from which I can actually see.

No finish line

My friend was listening - to the signals around him and to his own thinking. Not searching, open. He knew an opportunity might come without him looking for it. And it did.

Most people never reach that openness. By the time they ask what a good opportunity looks like, das Man has already answered it for them. Heidegger called the alternative authentic projection - taking up your actual direction as your own rather than the They's version. Not a technique or a process. Not a destination. A practice. The discomforts are not obstacles to it - they are signs you are actually doing it.

The essence of an opportunity is the person. Which means orienting yourself toward opportunities and orienting yourself toward yourself are the same work. One doesn't come before the other. They are the same thing.

And you are always mid-turn.

Fair warning: it is one hell of a ride.