Why 95% of People Never Find What They’re Looking For (and How You Can Join the 5% Who Do)
Most people overlook what’s right in front of them. Here’s how not to.
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Most people live their life without knowing what they want from it. They wake up, do what everyone else is doing, and then complain that are not satisfied.
Without a clear sense of what we want, we get swept along by habits, expectations, and distractions. It’s not that opportunities don’t exist. But if we don‘t know where we’re going it’s very difficult to take the right path.
In on of my previous letters, I explained why deciding where you are going is one of the most important decisions you‘ll ever make in your entire life. In this letter I’ll share a simple trick that will help you see the world in a new way. It will let you uncover opportunities that most people overlook and make it far easier to get where you want to go.
Let’s consider how our minds work the moment we start considering buying a new car. At first, the idea is vague. You think, Maybe I should start looking. But the moment you settle on a specific model, you begin to notice it everywhere. Let’s say we settle for a yellow car, yesterday you couldn’t recall the last time you saw one. Today, they seem to be on every turn, at every light, in every parking lot. Did the world suddenly fill up with yellow cars overnight? Of course not. They were always there, what has changed is your attention.
This illustrates a principle that philosophers and psychologists have long recognized: perception is selective. We don’t absorb the world as it is; we filter it through our own lens depending on our interests and intentions. That’s how our minds work, we process what we are prepared to notice. Once you decided what you want to notice, your brain starts filtering out the noise and highlighting what matters: Opportunities, connections, solutions.
But vague wishes rarely change anything. To say “I want to be successful” or “I want to be happy” is too broad to guide perception. Success and happiness are abstractions—impossible for the mind to filter. But to say “I want to learn a new skill within the next six months” or “I want to grow my business by finding ten new clients” gives the mind a specific pattern to detect. Just like choosing a yellow car makes yellow cars visible everywhere.
Opportunities are rarely discovered by accident. They are recognized by people who are looking for them. The partnership that accelerates your career, the headline that doubles your marketing response, the product idea that suddenly clicks—these things are all around, but they remain invisible until your mind has been trained to search for them.
To live without a chosen focus is to let your mental lens default to “random”, allowing anything and everything to occupy your attention. To live with focus is to choose what matters to us and allow the rest to pass by. The key lies in narrowing. At any given moment, you must decide what deserves your attention most. This doesn‘t mean the rest of life disappears; it means that for that period of time, we train your perception toward one priority. When that goal has been achieved or satisfied, you can move on to the next.
The danger lies in wanting too many things at once. Modern society encourages this: we are bombarded with images of other people’s achievements, lifestyles, and possessions, each one tempting us to expand our wish list. The result is a fragmented focus. We want everything and therefore obtain nothing.
“Ask and it shall be given you, seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you. For every one that asketh, receiveth, and he that seeketh, findeth, and to him that knocketh, it shall be opened.” — The Sermon on the Mount
Those who never ask, never seek, and never knock will pass by countless opportunities. Those who narrow their attention and persistently seek will uncover what they are looking for. This is not a matter of luck, nor a mystical law of attraction—It is the logic of perception. The act of deciding what matters most to you is the act of training your mind to reveal it.
The yellow cars were always there. The opportunities were always there. You simply hadn’t taught yourself to see them. So the real question is not whether life contains opportunities. It always does. The question is whether you have chosen what you want to find.
What is your yellow car? What is the one thing that, if you focused on it now, would change the shape of your days? Decide, and then begin to look. At first, you may find nothing. Then, gradually, you will see more. Soon it will feel as though they are everywhere.
This is just my perspective, and I believe the best ideas emerge from different angles. What's your experience with this? Would you add or refine anything?
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