The Greatest Entrepreneurs Have an Eye for Opportunities, Hidden or Otherwise

Have you ever known someone who always had an idea on how to make something or a situation better? If not, look harder because these people are all around you, believing that there is always room for improvement. Those same people will attempt to make things better, and some of those people will even patent ideas and launch businesses rooting from just the idea.

Take an example from the person who invented the train toilet, Lewis Howard Latimer. There was a huge need for toilets on trains because without them, all the feces would end up on the tracks. Who wouldn’t want to put a stop to that, right, but it was Latimer who saw the opportunity to do so instead of looking for someone else to do it.

There was also a Black man named Jan Ernst Matzeliger who invented the shoe laster machine that could make hundreds of shoes in one day versus the slow process of hand making shoes one at a time which took days on end. This is why we have the massive amount of shoes in shoe stores today for everyone and most sizes to enjoy.

But even in the retail business, we see someone like Reverend Leon Howard Sullivan who created the first Black owned shopping center in the USA during a time when Black people weren’t being treated fairly, so he created a place for Black people to be able to shop and be treated fairly.

All these examples show one common thing – these people saw a need to make things easier and better, so they did. As an entrepreneur, focus on watching and truly understanding the way things operate. Take part in certain activities, and in those activities, discover opportunities while you work. Everything from pandemics, to seasons, to times of day, bring on different obstacles. These obstacles are opportunities for entrepreneurship because entrepreneurs fill in the gap!