Clinching on kingmaking opportunities

Kobina Ansah Lifestyle Jun - 04 - 2021 , 16:06

When you get an opportunity, make the most of it because you may never know which doors it could open.
Over the years, I have realised that the opportunities we desire don’t present themselves as such. The Holy Scripture says: “All good and perfect gifts come from above”, however, the packaging may not always look good and perfect. This is what I call the kingmaking phenomenon. If you want to survive the system as a Ghanaian youth, you need to have an eye that recognises kingmaking opportunities.

Anybody can easily disregard kingmaking opportunities because they do not always look appealing. A lot of people have missed out on big opportunities because of the way they reacted in certain situations.

For example, some people are not working today because when they got an opportunity to do an internship, they either refused or showed bad attitude and that made them lose out on opportunities that were supposed to come through that internship.

Also, people lost job recommendations that were unknown to them because of how they treated a stranger or how they reacted in an unpleasant situation. I could cite myriads of such situations that have cost people knowingly or unknowingly.

Before I let you in on a few ways to identify these kingmaking opportunities, let me share a real-life example of how king maker helped a friend I know. I have a female friend who had been unemployed after her national service for about two years.

She applied to many job openings, went for many interviews but to no avail. She told me she felt like giving up because she couldn’t take the pressure from her parents anymore.

One day, she received a call from a company to start work the following week. She found out that it was her boss from the national service who recommended her to the company. This is a classic example of the kingmaking phenomenon.

So how do we identify the kingmaking opportunities as young people? Unfortunately, for us, kingmaking opportunities can be very unassuming, and this means that we must approach every opportunity from the very mundane ones to rare ones with utmost diligence. Because you may never know which opportunity may be an audition for you. Treat everyone you meet well.