EVER since our schooldays the achievements of great men have been held up to us as examples of what we may accomplish if we will only make the most of our opportunities. The fact that the world's greatest benefactors started in very humble walks of life and were often obliged to reckon with poverty, discouragement, neglect, lack of appreciation, abuse and even violent opposition, to say nothing of a host of other negative factors, is emphasized to magnify their triumphs and to encourage us to meet with an equable mind the difficulties we have to face. Every one can think of a score in a minute or two— men and women who have laid humanity under obligation to them for their innumerable services.
Perhaps the largest class of opportunities has to do with supplying mankind with more efficient means of overcoming difficulties, more economical methods, shorter and safer processes, quicker or otherwise better ways of reaching desired ends than formerly existed. Perhaps also it is safe to say that as a rule the people who have worked out and made the benefits practical have had to do with methods or implements that were cumbersome, or they were obliged to face difficulties or disadvantages that apparently could not be avoided. Doubtless the fact that the method or the procedure in vogue was not ideal in a great many cases, was the primal reason why these people worked out improved plans. In other words, they exercised thought to improve their conditions and those of their fellow men.
It is evident from this last suggestion that thought along lines of improvement is directly responsible for the improvement. The wish becomes father to the thought and grandfather to the manifestation of the thought, whether this takes the form of a tool, a process, a system, or what not. If this deduction be correct, it follows that the individual who is thinking and observing is more likely to perceive opportunities for improvement than is the person who merely drifts with the flotsam and jetsam of disjointed opinions on the sea of human speculation. Such an individual—the thinker—is far more alert than the average man to grasp opportunities. The fact is that opportunities are pressing upon us all the time. They are ours for the seizing.
