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Suggestion number ten on the list from the Seven Sages of Ancient Greece of one hundred and forty-seven things everyone should practice is – Prepare for opportunities.

There are various opportunities for which we can prepare, and they can be categorized as traditional  opportunities and Black Swan opportunities. Traditional opportunities are those which we can foresee and are the ones which are taught in school and in on-the-job training. They are physical skills that are learned on the sports field, and social skills that are learned in conversation, and they are mental skills that are learned on various electronic devices. Here is a long list of occupations and salaries, that have standards of education and career promotion. These are the jobs that can be prepared for and will bring about a standard, generally middle-class successful life.

Another set of opportunities have a different career path, that is to the upper classes of society. These require going to the right schools. Believe it or not, kiddies, a degree from your local community college isn’t equivalent to a degree from an Ivy League school. It isn’t so much the book information that is learned as the attitude toward information that makes the difference. That higher education is based on attitudes as to who you are and what is expected of you. The lower rungs of education are preparation to fill jobs that will be needed, the higher level education is to create jobs for people to create products that will be needed. The highest level jobs status-wise among the best students are those who create new things for societies to consume. These people generally don’t work for money, although they have enough, even plenty; these people work for the joy of discovering things no other human has ever known, and presenting it to their world.

That idea brings me to the Black Swans of the world of ideas. These pursuits are of the ideas that are way outside of the standard concept of work of the typical employee. These realms are where the time and energy of humanity’s most creative people are spent, and where fabulous new things come into humanity’s zone of usefulness. These ideas bring a satisfaction to the angels of the mind of these people who spend much of their best moments over the edge into the unknown unknowns. They are not crazy, because they recognize the difference between the realities of the alternate world they are living in and the fantasy. They recognize the difference between the impossible and possible, and they are willing to exert the effort to bridge the chasm between the known and doable and the unknown and the possibly doable.