Opportunity knocks, but it doesn’t break the door down. Mark Twain said he was “seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one.” Francis Bacon wrote that “a wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.” Albert Einstein noted that “in the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.” And Rabelais reported, “I have known many who could not when they would, for they had not done it when they could.” Is our understanding of opportunity limited to clever sayings, homely folk wisdom, and contradictory aphorisms, or can we mount a more systematic approach to learning what makes an opportunity?

Are there practical implications to gaining a firmer understanding of what constitutes an opportunity? Author Donald Morris believes there are, and he convincingly demonstrates his belief in the context of what he calls high-end opportunities—those rare but critically important and time-bound occasions where what we choose to do or to become inexorably shapes and alters the future course of our lives. Reliably recognizing and effectively confronting such opportunities is an ability that can be honed and refined when we become aware of the disparate dimensions of opportunity and learn to view important problems by focusing in turn on each facet comprising an opportunity’s richness and potential.