If your ship doesn’t come in, swim out to it!

If your ship doesn’t come in, swim out to it! – Johnathan Winters

It looks like your ship is leaving! Do you want it badly enough to swim after it?

What does that mean?
This is a quote by the late great funny man Johnathan Winters. While it’s said in a humorous manner, the quote is very serious. How long are you going to wait for the perfect opportunity? How long will you wait for your ship to come in?

How many times will you let it cruise by, ready for you, but not close enough for you to conveniently get to it? Yes, it would be nice to walk up the gang-plank and be greeted by the Captain as a dignitary. But what if it just isn’t going to happen?

The quote says that you should go ahead and get wet! Swim out to it as soon as it gets close! Every time you watch it going away, you have to wonder if it will come back. And sometimes it doesn’t. What then? You’re out of luck, all because you didn’t get moving. That’s not good, is it?

Why is advantage of opportunities important?  
We’d all like to think that the perfect opportunity will be awaiting us, just around the next corner. However, most of us know from experience that this is rarely the case. We have to weigh our options, and then take advantage of our best opportunity.

Sometimes the cost of taking this opportunity is not being able to take the next opportunity. However, in my experience, waiting for something better usually results in having nothing. It may be a fine line, but if you’re waiting for opportunity to find you, you may be waiting for a very long time.

Taking advantage of opportunities is the opposite of procrastination. Don’t be caught sitting on the dock as your ship sails away without you. Sometimes you will have to get wet and claw your way onto the boat like a half-drowned rat. But it may be the only way to take advantage of the opportunity.

Where can I apply this in my life?
I imagine that we all have had the experience of missing out, because we waited too long, and the ship left without us. How often do we later wonder what we were waiting for? Yes, we’ve all been there. However, I would recommend going light on the recriminations, and learn from the experience.

How do you know it’s your ship? That’s a very personal question, and only you can answer that question. Not every ship that sails by or stops in is for you. Figuring out which is which is an interesting activity. But just sitting on your butt in the sand isn’t going to get you on board, is it?

If you can figure out what you’re looking for, you can anticipate your ship or at least be on the lookout for it. Then comes the moment of decision, do you wait and hope it comes in and docks, or do you swim out to meet it? It’s not always an easy thing to determine.

By the time you figure out it’s not coming in to dock, it may already be pulling away, headed off to get someone else. Someone who wants to be onboard more than you did. Is that something you want to happen to you? I would think that you wouldn’t.

So, once you have a good idea as to what you want to do, it might be prudent to keep a sharp eye out for your ship. Or, if on closer consideration, you determine that you aren’t waiting for a ship, but are waiting for a train, it might be time to leave the beach and find the train station, right?

What you want out of life you can usually manage to do, if you take advantage of the opportunities which move you in that direction. For most of the people I have read biographies of, and from my own experience, the path from where you are to where you want to be is rarely a straight line.

In how many areas of your life are you waiting, passively, for something special to happen? Can you take a moment to consider what you would need to make it worth swimming out to meet your ship? How good does it have to be to be worth it? Try it for each area of your life and see what you think.

Keeping your eyes open for anything that advances you in the direction of your goals or dreams is necessary to spot your ship. Once you know how badly you want to get to it, you’ll know how far out you’re willing to swim to get to it.

Is this your ship? Are you ready to get wet?

From: Twitter, @Quote_Soup
confirmed at : http://quotationsbook.com/quote/47023/#sthash.RnayeNYq.dpbs
Photo by Don McCullough