Are You Choosing The Best Opportunities?

By Neil Eldred

Every so often you read something that makes you look at life differently. A few years ago I read an article that explained opportunity in a way made me reconsider how I live my life.

I’ve since lost the article, but the model of opportunity—both chosen and lost—has stuck with me.

Here’s what I learned.

Opportunities Exist in Phase Space

Opportunities, this model holds, don’t happen in a vacuum. They occur in a place called phase space.

What is phase space, then? Here’s an illustration to envision this realm.

Picture yourself at birth. Now imagining zooming out from yourself. See yourself as a point floating in three dimensional space.

Time, of course, is the fourth dimension. You and your three dimensions are traveling through time. This is important: you cannot travel back to some point you left behind. You can only travel forward in time.

Now this space that surrounds you is called phase space. It comprises every opportunity that can exist for you during your lifetime. As you travel, you come in contact with opportunities. Those that you do not choose get left behind.

You Lose Opportunities at Birth

At birth you sit at the edge of phase space. Spread 180 degrees ahead of you are all the opportunities that are available to you during your life.

But you do not have access to every opportunity available out of all possible opportunities. Genetics limits the choices for even a baby. For instance:

• Perhaps his genes are programmed so that he will be only five feet, five inches tall, depriving him of the opportunity to be a professional basketball player
• Maybe her genes constructed her mouth and vocal cords in such a way that she has an unpleasant voice, meaning she won’t have the opportunity to be a professional singer
• Possibly he or she will have a learning disability when it comes to math, closing off a variety of career opportunities

Even before you start moving through life, and through time, certain opportunities are unavailable to you. And more disappear as you continue your journey through phase space.

Moving Through Phase Space

As you move through phase space you are presented with opportunities.

Opportunities present us with choices. Those choices have consequences.

Each choice changes our path through phase space, carrying us away from that which we did not choose.

For example, choosing to study human services in college takes us away from the path of becoming a doctor. This path will mean less income and put all the things we could access with that forsaken money out of reach.

And that’s the point of the metaphor of phase space. Choose your opportunities carefully.

Or, more blatantly, choose what you love.

What Happens to Opportunities You Don’t Choose?

You are presented with opportunities, frequently, even if you don’t recognize them as such. Choosing an opportunity sends you down an alternate path though phase space leaving other opportunities behind.

Picking one opportunity means not picking others. A majority of those opportunities left behind will never be presented again. The occasional opportunity will present itself two or maybe three times.

For the most part, however, an opportunity not chosen is an opportunity lost forever.

Always ask if you can live with leaving an opportunity behind in phase space.

Can you live with your choice?

What This Means for You

I find this model of choosing opportunities to be very profound. I look at my current options and compare them to my son’s—who is in his freshman year of college. I can’t help feeling envious at the amount of phase space he has available to him.

As I reflect on my own journey through phase space, I see that my path looks like the trail left by a drunken sailor stumbling through freshly fallen snow.

I always grasped at presented opportunities as if I would never have another. A lot of the time I chose the wrong ones.

What does your path through phase space look like so far?

Are you happy with your choices? Did they lead to more attractive opportunities?

If you’re unhappy with the past, you can face your present with more awareness. Ask yourself if choosing an opportunity will limit your future opportunities or present many more.

Know that by choosing you are closing off other opportunities. Is that what you want?

Know what you won’t give up, no matter how grand the prize. Make your choices consciously. Don’t give up long held dreams for short term gain. If you must put a dream on hold, look for a path that will take you past the opportunity again so you can fulfill it.

Make sure you are the one choosing your path through phase space. Don’t let someone else choose your opportunities for you.

Looking back at a life of opportunities lost in service of fulfilling someone else’s goals causes resentment and pain.

In short, make choices that will make you happy and enrich your life.

May you always have vast expanses of phase space available to you.

What won’t you give up for any opportunity? Tell us in the comments below.