It appears that scientists recently studying a far-off pulsar have concluded that one of its orbiting planets is probably made of pure diamond. Get that! A whole planet made out of diamond – wow, I wonder how many karats that would be? It makes me wonder if ever we might get to the stage where we would begin mining other planets for minerals as those resources become evermore scarce upon the Earth.
The idea of going to far off places to mine for diamonds also reminds me of the Acres of Diamonds lecture that was once given repeatedly by Russell H Conwell and later became a personal development classic. The essence of the story is that you might easily fail to recognise diamonds even if they were sitting there, right under your nose, in your own back yard.
Why might you fail to see diamonds in your own garden? Because diamonds do not naturally come in the cut and polished form that we might bring to mind if we were asked to think about them. A rough, uncut diamond, to the uneducated eye, might just look like a worthless lump of aggregate and that too is exactly how opportunities often look, to us, when they arrive.
It is easy to look at someone else’s life story in retrospect, see how they managed to seize upon opportunity when it came and so conclude that they were lucky, that they were in the right place at the right time. But there would have been many other people in the right place at the right time too and a major difference between those who were successful and those who missed the opportunity is that successful people were able to recognise opportunity.
Opportunity is frequently missed for the reason that it usually comes disguised as hard work. It takes a good deal of effort to transform a rough uncut diamond into the cultivated jewel we would all love to possess. So too do the opportunities that surround you right now. The ones that are right under your nose, sitting in your own back yard.
So I wonder if you might like to spend a bit of time looking at those problems that you are struggling with right now, for example. Because, if you are struggling, then so too are others. Does that represent opportunity for you? And what else is there, right under your nose, in your home town, that represents your opportunity? Go find it and when you have, commit to cutting and polishing until you produce that precious jewel.
It is in fact the action of cutting and polishing that adds the value and that is also a lovely metaphor for what you need to do to achieve outstanding success.
