By Biz Stone, cofounder of Twitter and Jelly Industries, Harvard Business Review |

I grew up in a very affluent town, but my parents divorced when I was young. My father wasn’t much involved in my life, and we were poor. Many kids I knew played Little League baseball and Pop Warner football, but I didn’t — by the time I was eight, I was mowing lawns and trying to earn money.

When I got to high school, it was immediately obvious that if you were on a sports team, you’d automatically be more plugged-in socially. I’m naturally athletic, but I’d never played organized best online casino sports; I tried out for basketball, baseball, and football, but I wasn’t good at any of them. Our school didn’t have a boys’ lacrosse team, and I figured that since no one else knew how to play lacrosse either, everyone would be as clueless as I was. So I persuaded the administration to start a team if I could find a coach and enough boys to sign up. And I did. Eventually I got very good at lacrosse and became team captain.

There’s a valuable lesson in that experience — one that applies to business, too. Some people think of opportunity the way it’s defined in the dictionary — as a set of circumstances that make something possible — and they talk about it as if it just arrives organically. You “spot opportunity” or wait around for “opportunity to knock.”