I remember the first time I heard the idea of buying an existing business instead of starting one from scratch. It came from Codie Sanchez, who's built her whole platform around exactly that, buying boring, unsexy businesses instead of starting new ones.

What got me wasn't the idea itself. It was that I had never even considered it as an option. I understood numbers. I understood operations. I understood what made a place run or fall apart. And somehow in my head, businesses were things people started or inherited. Buying one belonged in a completely different category, one I didn't even know I had until I noticed I did.

I had this same realization all over again a couple weeks ago, talking with my friend Christine Slocumb about the twenty-plus years she spent building her marketing agency before she sold it.

In this episode:

• Why you're not missing opportunities because there aren't enough of them, you're missing entire categories of them
• How proximity trains pattern recognition, and why that goes so much deeper than motivation or inspiration
• The identity filter that quietly rules out categories before they even get to yes or no in your brain
• Why your comfort level was never measuring the opportunity, it was measuring your exposure to it
• Why the menu you think you're choosing from is only a fraction of what actually exists
• Three ways to be part of an opportunity that don't all require capital: own it, help finance it, or connect it
• The Opportunity List to start building this week

Go build the list. And when someone tells you they're retiring, when someone tells you they're selling, when someone says their landlord wants out, wait. And think.