Editor of Mad Hatter.

If you can find room in an upcoming issue of the Mad hatter,

 

VOL, 56, No, 9

this issue of the Royal Bank of Canada Monthly Letter, I
believe is worth reprinting. Provided of course people

will take time to read it. Ron Tarves, Institutes.

_

$$ $$$ + — rr

HEAD OFFICE: MONTREAL, SEPTEMBER 1975

A Wise Person's Opportunities

OPPORTUNITY is a special arrangement of circumstances
offering a person the chance to step in with ideas for
something new, something better, something unique,
It can show itself as a favourable occasion, time or
place for learning or saying or doing a new thing. It
offers a means of self-expression.

We may with safety assume that nothing being done
in any business or profession or government today is
being done as well as it might be done. Anyone who
doubts this should listen to the conversations going on
at cocktail parties and coffee sessions and the speeches
being madeat political rallies and community meetings.

Superficial people remain indifferent spectators of
events which, did they seize the opportunity to take
part in them, might become the agents of their
prosperity. It is a sad fact of life — but one that is
serviceable to the ambitious person —that most
people do not seek ideas or opportunities to put ideas
into use. If everyone had the urge and the intelligence
to seize opportunities, your task to excel would be
much more difficult.

A spirited mind will not be content to remain
within itself, It will reach out for chances to prove its
worth. In looking for and seizing opportunities we
come alive, vitally aware of ourselves.

We find great satisfaction in doing something
beneficial that has not been attempted before, or has
been attempted and given over, or only partly achieved.

Having looked at the meaning of opportunity, it is
well to decide what wisdom is. The wise person
chooses and follows what contributes most certainly
to his lasting happiness. He avoids shallow. judgments
and irrelevant issues. Professor Alfred North White-
head wrote: “It is the function of wisdom to act as a
modifying agency on the intellectual ferment so as to
produce a_ self-determined issue from the given
conditions.”

While it is true that people are wise only in things
of which they have knowledge, information is not
wisdom. Information should be used for thinking.
Science and. study give us knowledge, but only
philosophy can ‘give us wisdom, and so the person
seeking to prepare for oppoftunity will find it valuable

Ql

to read books that contain a flavour of wisdom rather
than only those that communicate a substance of
knowledge.

Opportunities do not arrive labelled with your name
and accompanied by instructions for making use of
them. An opportunity does not always present itself
rounded out and complete. It is not a beautiful
butterfly attracting admiring attention, but more
frequently a larva which the ignorant crush underfoot
and the indolent squirm away from.

Opportunity is to be grasped when offered. A
condemned man about to be hanged was given the
usual opportunity to say a few words. “Not just now,”
he said. As Francis Bacon said in his picturesque way:
“Opportunity turneth a bald noddle after she hath
presented her locks in front, and no hold taken.”

Not-many opportunities are of the ‘‘sometime”’ sort,
to be attended to when you get around to them. The
credit for achievement goes to the person who does
things, not to the person who first thought of them.

A wise person will not despise an opportunity
merely because it seems small. Write it down, make a
note of the advantages it offers, and assess its poten-
tials. They may expand under your close inspection.

A person of small mind and limited imagination
wastes time waiting for big opportunities: the success-
ful person uses his time taking advantage of the little
opportunities as they come along. He catches up trifles
and makes something worthwhile out of them, finding
in them the beginnings of great enterprises.

The world is well stocked with people who enjoy
knocking things down, but changing one small thing
for the better is worth more in satisfaction of achieve-
ment than proving a thousand things faulty.

Opportunity in business

Opportunity to improve their lives crowds upon
people who wish to take advantage of it, but they are
people who do not passively wait for Opportunity
with a capital ‘“‘O” to come into their offices or
workshops. They look around. They have the quality
of discovering and utilizing previously undetected