When the window closes.
In 2023, Sarah Tavel wrote, Taking advantage when a window opens for you. She joined Pinterest in 2012 and watched how one small PR moment skyrocketed their small platform into becoming the “darling of the internet world”. Tavel then explains that when a window of opportunity opens up to you, leap wholeheartedly through it:
Trust me when I say this: the window will close, so do everything you can to maximize your moment.
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The thing about jumping through your window when it opens is that it causes it to stay opened longer. Hiring great people raises the bar internally on execution. Growth sustains if not accelerates. Things start to compound more and more. A window that might be open for a few months can stay opened for several.
But eventually the window will close. This is not to say your business isn't still thriving, but the universe has just retracted its cosmic help, moving on to new younger startups whose stars are about align. You'll look back and miss that time when gravity loosened its grip. But hopefully you won't regret not acting on it.
In business, you can open doors and windows and (importantly) keep them open for far longer when you lean into the momentum they bring. Whether that means sustaining your revenue growth, continually hiring great minds, and so on. This can also apply to people and relationships; you can meet new people in the places you love, sense their receptivity, and immediately feel that deep connections will form. Or, you can find a partner at a very special time in your life and foster an experience that can’t be replicated.
Windows of opportunity are momentary endeavours that crack open in your life to request a response of urgency, decisiveness, and commitment from you. As Tavel observed, these particular moments and seasons where “gravity loosens its grip” and the universal forces align in our favour, will never stay open indefinitely. The muses and fortunes that were fanning our sails and moving us forward will eventually turn their attention elsewhere. No matter how big the opportunity is, if you don’t take it, it can close for good.
The sobering reality is that timing is consequential. So, it’s crucial for you to develop the virtues of awareness, intentionality, and an uncompromising willingness to seize possibilities while they are sat squarely before you. As once said by Norm Macdonald:
The only thing an old man can tell a young man is that it goes fast, real fast, and if you’re not careful it’s too late.
Listen to the urges when you have them and know when to strike. If you choose to miss the window, assuming it will always be around waiting for you to be ‘ready’, you will most likely lose all the potential and energy you would have gained through that window — and any forthcoming windows — for good.
It’s not saying you’ll never be able to achieve what you saw, but the chance you just had to get it sooner has passed. We know inspiration is perishable, so every window is an urgent call to action. If you let things sit for too long, it dies. As Isabel said, “Like dough, ideas need your attention when they are rising. They need you to act when the timing is right”.
Creating builds intuition. You need the time to watch some ideas rot and others flourish. You need the experience of knowing what not to do next. You need to see that you never wait until you’re 100% ready to take action. Otherwise, you’ll look back with an unending sense of frustration. “If only I had acted on the impulse there and then and got it done.”
As Tavel reminds us, those intense periods of embracing actualisation — the “times when gravity loosened its grip — contain the impacts and positively reinforcing effects that expand your windows of opportunity. With each full-bodied leap you make through the chances you get in life, you are re-sculpting the probabilities of success in your favour, creatively re-rendering the landscape to maximise the chances that gave you traction towards a better self.