New year, new opportunities!
Yesterday, I took down my tree and put away my Christmas decorations.
It was a bittersweet experience!
Yeah, I know I’m out of synch. Radio stations stopped playing Christmas music on Dec. 27 already. But then, they’d already started in the middle of November.
Not me! I don’t start Christmas prep until Dec. 1. And it’s got to stay until at least the New Year.
Why bittersweet, you wonder? Because Christmas is so special, so magical that it’s hard for me to let it go. I’d like those warm fuzzies to linger for . . . well, forever, I guess.
But I suppose that could never happen. If I don’t pack them away, they’ll lose their magic, and return next year much diminished. A month is long enough to have their appeal resurrected in another eleven.
So, Christmas packed away, one can either “return to the old grind,” or imagine new opportunities. I choose the latter. 2023 will be different from 2022. And, as much as is in my power, I will endeavor to find opportunities to make the new year better than the old.
Hey, is there anything wrong with setting a goal to make it “the best year of my life?” A friend of mine once told me that every morning when he gets up, he declares that “this is going to be the best day of my life!”
A great resolve, in my opinion!
In my world new opportunities keep coming my way. Am I lucky? Perhaps. But, as the saying goes, “Luck happens when preparation meets opportunity.”
That’s certainly been my experience. The more I prepare, the more I educate myself in my field of endeavor, the more experiences I’ve had in that field, the easier it is to identify and grasp new opportunities when they come. As an entrepreneur, I know that not every opportunity will get fulfilled as I do my own due diligence on it. In fact, maybe only a minority of them will proceed. But some will.
A significant opportunity came my way last month. I’ve had a lot of fun imagining the possibilities, doing my due diligence on a significant project, and planning as though it will be wildly successful. (Hey, that’s more fun, for me, at least, than doing jig-saw puzzles over Christmas–though, someone reminded me that, essentially, I was putting together a puzzle.)
I don’t yet know whether the project will proceed. If it doesn’t, that’s Okay. My enthusiasm probably has me imagining a far too optimistic outcome, anyways. But I’ve had a lot of fun planning it. If it does proceed, I’ll have the delight of implementing those ideas and creating my big opportunity for 2023.
And I’ll have picked up another significant experience to prepare me to capture the next opportunity that may come my way.
Most of the rent 2 own deals I’ve done recently have required a lot of creativity; in fact, every new deal in 2022 was creative, somewhat “outside the box.” I could never have put these together in my early days in the business. I simply didn’t have the range of experience to imagine how I could stretch my box to include them.
But 11 years into this business, I see new opportunities because my experiences keep stretching my box.
On this New Year’s promontory (dictionary def’n: a headland overlooking the ocean; my def’n: a perch to view the future), I look forward to the opportunities that may lie ahead in 2023. Hopefully, that includes doing some more creative new rent 2 own deals, maybe for some of you.
How about you? Are there opportunities in your field of endeavor that may be imagined, and perhaps grasped, in 2023?
It would be a bummer just to “go back to the old grind.”
At least, that’s how I see it . . .
(P.S. I guess now you know why I named my company Promontory Enterprises Inc.)
