Today, I got this daily quote as a present from Google:

Your big opportunity may be right where you are now..

Napoleon Hill

And it reminded me of a post I wrote on Facebook years ago, back when I used to write on Facebook instead of a blog (big mistake: now I no longer have access to my own posts, except when Facebook decides to show me a random "memory" and I take a screenshot, like in this case).

(Photo of a bunch of multicolour lanterns in San Francisco´s Chinatown)

I don´t know exactly when I wrote it; I reckon it was around 2009. The title I gave it was "Interesting times", a heading that I think is also very appropriate for the times we´re living in now, so here you go:

... But I don´t like being this way, I don´t like living as a pessimist, so I prefer searching through popular wisdom to try and find a different way of looking at things. And a phrase came into my mind, something about the Chinese using the same word for crisis and opportunity... Thanks to Saint Google, I found the graphical representation for those two words:

Simplified Chinese:
危机 (Crisis)
机会 (Opportunity)

Traditional Chinese:
危機 (Crisis)
機會 (Opportunity)

The key here is that the last ideogram in crisis is the first one in opportunity, so they´re not exactly the same, it´s more that one can develop into the other: in each crisis, we can find an opportunity.

The way I see it, the word crisis is passive: a crisis is something that comes upon you, and that you cannot control. But the word opportunity is a call to action, a call to react to what is happening, to do something about it. 

So, as always, the decision is ours: we can choose to see these "interesting times" as a worldwide crisis in which we´re simply the victims, or we can choose to see them as an opportunity, a wake-up call, the push that we need to rethink our approach to life and start making conscious and responsible decisions, learn from our mistakes and adapt to the new times.

What are your thoughts on this? What examples do you have, from your own life, where a crisis turned into a big opportunity? I have a few, so I´m sure you have them too.

By the way, the made-up word in the title, "crisitunity", was apparently invented by Homer Simpson, in an episode where Lisa told him about the Chinese using the same word for both things... And even though now we know it´s not exactly like that, this is still a really interesting idea, and a good example of how our language often determines our way of thinking.