Grasping opportunity by developing good thinking habits

You can’t find opportunity if you go about with your eyes closed—or even just by looking straight ahead. You need to look around properly if you want to find good ideas.

There seems to be something about the way the human mind works that makes us see things in black and white. I don’t mean we see things without color—which is true only if you’re color blind—but that we often see things simply and don’t want to accept the complexity of things. There’s something to be said for keeping things simple. It can help us to get things done. But when it comes to finding and grasping opportunity, it can be a serious disadvantage.

The reason that human beings like to see things simply is that the human brain seems to seek patterns. Once it has found a pattern it makes the decision that the pattern explains how something works. Anything that doesn’t fit into the pattern is then disregarded. It’s the same with developing categories for things. We develop categories to sort things. After that anything that doesn’t fit into a category is disregarded or placed into a category of “miscellaneous” because it doesn’t “fit”.

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