If I am honest, work was going brilliantly. Genuinely smashing it. My personal life — relationships, meeting people, the part of life that happens outside a calendar invite — was not going nearly as well, and for a long time I had an explanation ready for that.
There just are not many opportunities to meet people. You get up, you go to the gym, you go to work, you go home. Maybe you catch up with friends at the weekend. Where exactly is this supposed to happen?
I believed that. Then I started journaling, and journaling has an inconvenient way of showing you your own patterns back. What kept surfacing was simple enough to be irritating: the parts of my life that were working were the parts I was actually giving attention to. Not luck. Attention.
Which raised a question I could not really avoid. Why was work going so well?
The answer was already sitting in a spreadsheet
Because I had done this deliberately before, twice, when it mattered.
When I graduated I could not find a decent job. So I set myself a target: apply to a set number of roles every single day, and write down whether I had. Not “look for work” — a number, tracked, daily.
Later I lost a job. I was contracting from Albania and the company decided they no longer wanted a contractor there. Same problem, same method: here is the goal, here is what I want, so what gets me there? A spreadsheet, a daily target, and an honest record of what I actually did rather than what I meant to do.
I applied to more than two hundred roles. I got the job I wanted, at the money I wanted. Plenty of people did not think that was on the table for someone working remotely from Albania. It was. It just needed the chance to be seen and then acted on.
That is the entire method, and it is almost insultingly obvious when you write it down: seek the opportunity, then take the action. How are you going to get the job if you never apply?
So I pointed it at the part that was not working
If that approach had rescued my career twice, there was no honest reason not to try it on the rest of my life.
So I built another spreadsheet. Same columns, different subject. The goal: start three conversations a day. Then, every day, two numbers — how many opportunities did I actually have, and how many did I take?
The first thing that happened caught me off guard. Once I was looking for opportunities, I started finding them everywhere. Walking down the street. Waiting for coffee. In the park. At a bar. They had always been there. I had simply never counted them, so as far as I was concerned they did not exist.
That on its own shifted something. It stopped being a story about scarcity and started being a question about attention — an opportunity mindset rather than a shortage.
Then came the part I did not enjoy
Once I had both numbers, I could work out the only one that actually mattered: the share of opportunities I acted on.
It was about twenty per cent.
That was uncomfortable reading, and it was also the most useful thing I had learned in months. Because it meant the problem had never been the world’s supply of opportunities. Life offers plenty. The gap was between noticing one and doing something about it, and that gap belonged to me.
The number moved, too. The more I looked for opportunities, the more I found. The more I found, the more I took. And the more I took, the more that part of my life genuinely improved. None of that is complicated. It is just invisible until you write it down.
Why it had to stop being a spreadsheet
The method worked. The logging was miserable.
Opportunities happen out in the world, so each one meant a note in my phone in the moment, and then an evening spent copying those notes into Excel to get the percentage. Two entries, in two places, hours apart. I was not even seeing the daily number — I would look at the week, or the month, long after the moment had gone.
That is the whole reason this app exists. It is that spreadsheet with the friction taken out: log the opportunity in the two seconds you have, wherever you are, and get the insight without the evening admin.
An opportunity habit
I should be straight about where that leaves me, because this is not a before-and-after story. Nothing is finished. That side of my life is better than it was — measurably, which is the entire point — but I have not figured it all out. It is on the right track, and I am still logging it.
That is what I mean by an opportunity habit. Not a streak to protect, and not a problem you solve once. A habit of looking for the opportunity, and then a rate that tells you honestly how often you took it. Mine is not where I want it yet. It is a good deal better than twenty per cent.
Life is full of opportunities. The only real questions are whether you are paying attention to them, and whether you do anything when you are.
I am still on this journey. I built the app I wanted for it, and it would be great to have you join me.