That's an interesting headline isn't it? The idea behind it is the question: Would you jump at an opportunity or just sit on the sidelines and let it pass you by?

It's a common conundrum we face, isn't it?

When we're in a lockdown that no-one has ever experienced anything like before with time on your hands, it's strange the sort of things that you ponder and consider.

My time since it began, has been spent trying to juggle my business and supporting a vulnerable family member who has started to need more hands on care, especially as the self isolation rules mean that he can't have his usual care staff coming in to help him.

In my downtime between all these tasks, I've begun to ponder other skills I might or should develop to help me with my business. We all have to constantly improve our business skills, if we are to be successful, don't we?

One of them I came across thanks to my sister was a copywriting course. It turns out to be a fascinating subject, as it's all about psychology. Not at all what I've always thought copywriting was, which was plain old selling in print - a real turnoff for me.

Learning how people think, why people make certain decisions, why some people jump at opportunities while other people just sit and ponder.

That's what gets my little grey cells excited!

There was a TV programme a few years ago by Derren Brown, an illusionist, who perfectly demonstrated this difference in some people by putting a $10 note on the pavement (sidewalk to my American friends) and waited to see how many people saw it and picked it up and how many just walked straight past it.

Afterwards, he asked them how lucky they thought they were. He found that those who just walked past the note all rated themselves as unlucky, while those who picked it up rated themselves as generally lucky.

His conclusion was that there's no such thing as luck, just opportunities that we choose to act on or not!

Pro-active or re-active?

People watching has always been a favourite pastime of mine. Sitting in the park and trying to figure out where people might be going, what they are doing and what they might be thinking. It's a bit like being a social detective.

The topic of trying to figure out what requirements might encourage someone to want to buy my products, transferring that need into print, resulting in more people buying them and enabling me and my family to better survive this lockdown and come out the other end in good shape, has certainly got me hooked.

This is an essential skill I think we all need to learn, to be able to run a successful online business, isn't it?

As this is getting a bit long here, I've written more about it on my Wisdom-Wings blog. If you want to continue reading about what I've been studying, there's a link to it in my profile.

Take care, stay safe and keep smiling,

Sue 😊