Fear, Opportunity, And The Action Moment

On May 3, I’ll be speaking at a TED-type event at Texas Health Resources (where our friend Ed Marx serves as VP/CIO). Just like TED, the talks are short, each 12 minutes and intended to be impactful. This week, I wrote out my remarks and, since I’m apparently incapable of more than one creative act per week (which I’ve previously admitted in this space), I print the first 600 or so words here. I’ll reprint the rest after the event.

Good afternoon. I’d like to augment the information you’ve heard about me with a very important addition – I’m a voracious consumer of information. But it’s not just any type of information; it’s specifically education about leadership and, more generally, the attainment of wisdom. The first, I learn mostly through reading biographies of great figures, both past and present; while the second I get from philosophers such as Seneca, a representative of the Stoic school of thinking. I like Stoicism because I’ve found it to be a particularly useful framework for dealing with the challenges, stresses, choices and opportunities life throws our way on a daily basis.

I’ve had the “opportunity” — and we’ll talk a lot about opportunity — to put some of the theories I’ve gathered into practice, and I’m going to share what is perhaps the most important of those theories with you today. We’ll call this concept the action moment.

What is the action moment? Well, to understand it, we first have to go back and talk about the nature of opportunity. And to do this, we must get serious. Opportunities, in the sense I intend, are not inconsequential things that pop up, recoil, and pop up again — the dynamic is not akin to Whac-A-Mole where you keep getting another shot. They are, in fact, the most precious things you’ll ever have the chance to avail yourselves of, and they must be approached with deadly seriousness. These serious opportunities, and how you respond to them, will define your life — grasp them and you will truly live; fail to muster the courage to take advantage of them, and you will forever define yourself, at least to yourself (which is most important), by that lack of courage. There are, in a sense, no second chances — the mole, once gone, will not pop again. There will be other chances, but the course of your life will have been altered forever — and I believe that a decision which is the result of fear can never alter your life for the better.

Interestingly, fear should play a role when a great opportunity presents itself — not the fear of grasping it, but rather the fear that it will slip away while you are figuring out if, and how, you’ll react. And this is what I want to talk to you about. I want to talk about the nature of the action moment — that narrow window of time between when the opportunity presents itself and when it quietly vanishes. And to be sure, it will quietly vanish, never warning you it’s about to leave, simply slipping away while you contemplate.

You can only respond effectively to the opportunity if you truly grasp this nature of the action moment. In doing so, you will react with focused, logical and determined intensity, with the absolute maximum speed short of panic, because, to be sure, truly unique opportunities are like the classic movie scene of two hands reaching out across a chasm, stretching to link before the chance is gone. In this scenario, either side may at any moment be gripped by the fear that their perilous situation warrants, and pull back. And you need not overtly recoil to spoil the moment, for even a lack of perceived enthusiasm, generated by dithering or delay, may cause the other party to doubt, and pull back.

You cannot sit back and ponder. You cannot let the ball sit in your court while the other side wonders if you intend on ever hitting it back. You cannot take your time without suffering the severest of consequences.

I’d like to tell you about a few action moments I’ve had in recent years, and how I dealt with them.

To be continued after the event …