Opportunity Knocks

I have a friend with a very interesting problem.  She and her husband are entrepreneurs who own several ventures.  For a while now, their business interests have required them to essentially live in different states. However, they’re tired of making the airlines rich with constant travel to see each other, and her husband really needs her help with the portion of the business that he’s running.

Long story short, my friend has essentially decided to step back from the venture she manages and hand the keys over to someone else.  The job description reads something like this:

Believe it or not, she’s having trouble filling this position.  Ideally, she’s hoping to find someone from her family to bring in (although I don’t think she’d be adverse to hiring the right person if she came across them randomly).  However, her own kids have their own careers that they are pursuing. Other relatives that are ostensibly suitable either don’t have the right work ethic or don’t want to move. (None of my friend’s relatives live in the state where her business is located.)

Frankly, I’m surprised that everyone isn’t fighting tooth and nail for this position.  I mean, the job isn’t rocket science at all.  The ability to read and perform some basic math are required, but it’s far from complicated. And it’s located in a major city, not some remote outpost in the wilderness.  Basically, the job is almost all pros, with very few – if any – cons. Nevertheless, no one that my friend has talked to seems to be excited about it.  In short, it’s like opportunity is knocking and no one wants to open the door.

To a certain extent, I understand this: people get in their comfort zone and don’t want to make a change.  Maybe they already have a job that they’ve held for a while and can practically sleepwalk through their daily routine. Thus, they aren’t interested in shaking things up – even for considerably higher pay.  Or perhaps they have a significant other and worry about how relocation will affect their relationship. Or maybe they’ve just never been west of the Mississippi, south of the Mason-Dixon line, or what have you, and are worried about how they’ll cope without a familiar support system.  Again, while I can understand these points of view, it just strikes me that they grossly limit one’s potential. As the old adage says: nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Looking at this from the standpoint of writing, I see indie authors every day who are still failing to take advantage of every opportunity presented to them.  For instance, there are those who only publish ebooks, forgetting almost entirely about the market for print.  Likewise, there are those who ignore the growing market for audiobooks (and I confess that I was one of them, but now find myself a convert).  In essence, if you’re an author, you need to be selling on all fronts.

Granted, it’s a little more work to put yourself in position to take advantage of many of the opportunities that are out there (and will take you out of your comfort zone in many instances), but the tremendous upside makes it worth it, in my opinion.  Plus, you don’t want to look back at some point and realize that you missed a golden opportunity somewhere along the way.  But maybe it’s like Thomas Edison said:

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”