A question worth sitting with

Francis Bacon — Lord Chancellor of England · One of the founders of the empirical tradition in Western philosophy · Portrait by Frans Pourbus the Younger, 1617 · Public domain

"A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds."

— Francis Bacon · Essays (1625)

Bacon does not say a wise person recognizes opportunity, or even seizes it. He says the wise person makes it — calls it into being from conditions that did not previously contain it. Those who only find opportunities are at the mercy of luck. Those who make them are not. Bacon spent his life putting this principle to work: as Lord Chancellor of England, as the architect of the inductive scientific method, and right to the very end — he died in 1626 after contracting pneumonia while conducting an experiment to test whether snow could preserve meat. Even his death was the result of making an opportunity to learn.

Where in your life are you waiting to find an opportunity — and what would it look like to make one instead?

Read the question once. Set it down. Let the difference between finding and making settle before you answer.

The world is rarely as generous with openings as we hope. The wise person stops waiting and starts assembling.