Dephic Maxim 10: Know your opportunity

I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.

10. Know your opportunity

Possibly my favourite character in Greek mythology — definitely in the Trojan Cycle — is Odysseus. Throughout the Iliad and the Odyssey he is referred to as ‘wise’, ‘strategic’, and even in Virgil’s Aeneid, where Ulysses is framed as the villain of the war, he is still ‘cunning’ and ‘wily’. Odysseus’ strength is his strategic mind — his ability to know and seize an opportunity.

It’s unrealistic to expect that people are thinking strategically at all times — that’s not how our minds work. We’re emotional, erratic, disorganised. But I think this is why a maxim that calls for us to recognise when opportunity is knocking is a good reminder to try, where possible to think strategically.

Strategy is about noticing when a situation arises in which you can leverage your strengths against your opponent’s weakness. Or if you have no opponent, against a situation you encounter. Sometimes, the strategic move is simply to be the last person standing, being aware not only of opportunity, but also of the times where inaction or evasion is a safer course of action. This is the strategy Nassim Taleb references in The Black Swan and Antifragile: increasing your exposure to positive unexpected events and decreasing your risk of negative ones. This is not only about knowing an opportunity when it arises, but about preparing for them to arise in the first place — about knowing how to create favourable conditions.

At the level of daily life, there are a multitude of ways to do this. Einstein once said — and this is possibly apocryphal — that compound interest was the most powerful force in the universe. This is particularly true when you think about the compounding of effort over time. A small amount of effort each day (for instance, writing for 15 minutes about the Delphic Maxims) compounds over time to be a lot of training, a significant output of work, and a stronger base of opportunity.

For me, this maxim represents the idea that living a good life — or at least living effectively — is elevated by our situational awareness. The more we attend to the opportunities around us, rather than casually allowing the world to make decisions for us, the better equipped we are to improve ourselves and our world. Excellence, explains Aristotle, is a habit, and as such it is something that we work on day to day.

So be like wily Odysseus, even if it’s in your dealings with someone in a board game, or when you’re calling your phone carrier about a bill. Don’t lose your cool, keep an eye out for opportunities, think strategically. Practical wisdom is a skill acquired over time, and practiced at every opportunity.