Do you feel like right now is a great time to be alive and opportunities abound? Because I do. I feel so blessed every day to be able to experience everything that life offers on a daily basis. We are living through an unprecedented event, maybe not in history, but in my lifetime. I used to watch movies such as The Andromeda Strain and The Omega Man in which an unknown virus began killing humans. COVID-19 has created vast changes in how we work and live. It has devastated small businesses and left millions unemployed. As each day passes we get closer to “flattening the curve” and it will be interesting to see what the world will look like once everything starts opening up.
It is said that adversity creates opportunity. Many people took advantage of the opportunities created during the Great Depression and became millionaires. Michael J. Cullen changed the retail landscape by creating the modern supermarket. He struck out on his own in 1930 and two years later his stores, King Kullen Grocery, were taking in more than $6 million in revenue. Charles Darrow, after the crash of 1929 was unemployed. He spent a few years perfecting a little parlor game that eventually became known as Monopoly. In 1932, Howard Hughes formed the Hughes Aircraft Company and built that into a major defense supplier. He was worth billions when he died in 1976.
While many people suffered, others took advantage of being unemployed and turned ideas into businesses. They saw the opportunity created by the Great Depression. Can you see the opportunity created by the current pandemic? It’s out there, opportunity is always out there, you just have to be able to see it. When you see it, you then have to act on it. In my post titled, The Wonderful, Awesome Power of Music, I wrote that the best time to act on something is right now. You need to take advantage of this great opportunity to decide what you want to do, why do you want to do it, and begin doing it right now.
My oldest daughter is studying kinesiology and exercise science in college and is becoming a personal trainer who will one day open up her own gym. She was researching the various certification courses, prices, and the length of time it takes to complete the course. After she explained what she found, she asked me which one I would take. I told her my choice and her reply was, one takes six months to complete, won’t that interfere with my college classes? I told her that it might but that’s why time management is so important. I said that if you’re going to do something then start it right now, not tomorrow, not next week, not 6 months from now. Start it today, and you will figure out how to successfully juggle schoolwork, work, and your certification.
For all the youth out there, I just want to say that we are living in the greatest time in our history. You can carry it around the world at your fingertips. Everything has sped up exponentially, from communication with other people to become wealthy. I used to have a little box I would wear on my belt called a pager. If someone needed to talk to me they would dial a certain number and the little box would vibrate. I would see the number of the person that wanted to talk to me. My little box would almost always only vibrate when I was nowhere near a telephone. Most of the time it was when I was in my car driving somewhere. There was no way to return the phone call through the little box therefore I would have to find the nearest thing we used to call a payphone. These were telephones that were spread throughout the city and you had to insert coins in order to make a phone call. Once I found a payphone, I would then have to scrounge around looking for coins to call the number on the little box. All this, finding a payphone, parking my vehicle near the payphone, getting out of my vehicle, looking for coins, walking to the payphone, and dialing the number, just to be told a bit of information that was probably the most unimportant information in the history of the planet. Now we can walk around with a computer in our pocket, we can search for any question that we have and communicate with anyone throughout the world without having to look for coins.
All it takes is a little creativity and you can make money without ever having to spend a day working a job you probably hate. I never would’ve thought that you could make money by videotaping yourself doing something that you do for one day, but people do. I had never heard of ASMR until I saw people making money carving soap or tapping their fingernails and whispering. My favorite though is GRWM videos, this is something we all do every day and people are making money just by videotaping themselves and getting ready. Is this a great time to be alive or what?
The ease at which we can obtain information today presents the greatest opportunity for all of us. You can literally find a step-by-step process to do anything. If you want to learn how to write a blog, there are bloggers who write blogs on how to write a blog. The Art of Blogging has very insightful and excellent tips on blogging. The world is literally at your fingertips, all you have to do is go out and discover it. I’ve always heard people say, “I can’t wait till my ship comes in,” and you might want to write this down, “Your ship has arrived. It is anchored just offshore and all you have to do is swim out to it and get on board.”
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What opportunities have you seen created? Are you taking advantage of them? Let me know in the comment section.
Works Cited:
Sabin, Greg. “10 People Who Made a Fortune During the Depression.” Mental Floss, 12 Aug. 2009, http://www.mentalfloss.com/.