The Opportunities You Never See Coming

Opportunity will always be more abundant than what we can grasp.

I think to a certain extent, this subconscious mind of ours has already acknowledged this fact and neglects all irrelevant opportunities to us.

You miss opportunities all the time, but you don't care, because you don't even realize that you've missed them.

A feature or a bug?

I think the fact is if we happen to be consciously aware of every potential money-making opportunity passing by each day, we'd be paralyzed by decision fatigue.

Even in a single random morning, there could be dozens of stocks moving, crypto fluctuations, side hustle possibilities, networking opportunities, and skill-building moments.

Our brains have to decide what's "signal" versus "noise" based on our existing frameworks and mental models.

Now, here's where this filtering system betrays us in the modern economy, which is that we unconsciously screen out wealth-building opportunities because they don't fit our traditional models of "how money is made."

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The Comfort Zone Filter

I personally experience that opportunities that seem remotely out of my comfort zone are never registered until or unless I've moved beyond that comfort zone, which is usually when the aha moment clicked in my head that I've missed an incredible opportunity.

The reality is that such occurrences only happen in hindsight, which is quite unfortunate to say the least.

My brain doesn't just ignore opportunities outside my comfort zone, it literally doesn't code them as "opportunities" in the first place.

They're invisible until I've already expanded my worldview.

Think about someone in 2009 completely ignoring Bitcoin because their brain categorized it as "fake internet money" not even registering it as a missed opportunity until years later.

Or consider how many traditionally-minded people dismissed social media influencing, drop-shipping, or app development as "not real jobs" while others were openly building six-figure income streams.

The Right Thing at the Wrong Time

But in my defense, I think even if it was clear to me during the actual moment the opportunity knocked on my door, I'll probably not have made the best use of it, simply because it's akin to the concept or rather phenomenon of the right thing coming at the wrong time, or maybe it's vice versa?

This insight cuts through the romanticized notion that if we could just "see" all opportunities, we'd capitalize on them.

Again, coming back to the Bitcoin example, someone who'd never touched technology being handed a detailed Bitcoin whitepaper in 2009 would likely lack the technical understanding, risk tolerance, or financial infrastructure to act meaningfully, even with perfect foresight.

I'm speculating here that probably if you trace back the early adopters who made fortunes on early Tesla stock, many of them were necessarily not traditional car investors but more so tech-minded individuals who recognized software eating hardware.

A similar observation could be said for those who crushed it with NFTs when they start becoming a thing. They were more of crypto natives who understood digital scarcity and less of "art collectors".

The point is modern wealth creation increasingly demands pattern recognition across domains.

The Adjacent Opportunity Principle

Your biggest financial opportunities probably exist at the intersection of what you already understand and adjacent spaces you're currently filtering out.

The finance person might ignore the creator economy as "not serious business" while having ideal skills to build financial literacy content.

They could monetize their expertise through courses, newsletters, or consulting, but their mental model says "real money" comes from traditional finance roles!

You need enough adjacent knowledge and confidence to execute when opportunity knocks.

The key is recognizing that your expertise is more transferable than you think, and that wealth creation has become more democratized but also more fragmented and non-obvious.

What We're Missing Right Now

Being too fixated on traditional signals of opportunity—job postings, formal investment channels, established business models—will always have a side effect on us not registering the informal, emerging, or unconventional wealth-building paths happening right under our noses.

For those of us caught in this pattern, the question isn't whether we're missing opportunities.

We're definitely are.

The question is: what domains adjacent to our expertise are we unconsciously filtering out right now?

Because somewhere in that blind spot, there's probably money waiting to be made.


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