In a very recent post of mine; Thought Vs Idea, I wrote about idea being the stepping stone from thought to action. Idea being the product of applied thought (where effort is put into achieving a desired result), and action being the product of idea. However, there is also opportunity that fits into the equation. Opportunity, like idea, is a stepping stone. The stepping stone from idea to action, but is not always necessary.
Opportunity is a situation where something is of a favourable time or occasion to act out. Opportunity is a product of idea and is carried out through action. When your are faced with a situation that you're not sure about, applied thinking is used. Through applied thinking, the brains natural path to problem solving starts to take place, sorting through the good and bad ideas, weighing up pros and cons (this is taking place through applied thought), after this stage a solution may arise that you feel is appropriate for the situation at hand. This is an idea.
Now the idea can go two ways from here, and only two ways. It can either be left untouched and forgotten about, or it can be acted upon. When acting upon an idea, opportunity and action now play their roles. I'm going to explain, but acting upon it is different than noticing the opportunity and then acting upon it.
Acting upon the idea is as straight forward as carrying it out. Once the idea your brain has presented to you has been accepted, it's just carrying out that idea to get from point 'A' (beginning) to 'B' (the finished product). There's nothing wrong with this, most of our thought-to-decision process is like this. It's an effective way to make decisions.
Now here's the difference between applying opportunity and then applying action, rather than applying just action. In the paragraph above I explained what I meant when I discussed about applying action without opportunity, now I'll explain what I mean with opportunity.
Opportunity, as I said at the start, is where a situation is of a favourable time or occasion to act out. Once you have your idea, if you are going to see if it is the opportune time or occasion, some more thinking will be required on your behalf. You will need to think "when is the best time to act this idea out", or "when would be the most optimal time to see the best result". This is where optimal thinking is beneficial. You will need to decide when the most optimal time is or when it will be best for you to carry out this action - it may take time to notice opportunities.
Not all ideas need opportunity, some can work-well whenever and do not need an optimal time to function. For example, for me to write this blog post, it doesn't make a difference whether I post it in the morning or late in the evening. My traffic flow will still remain consistent, and as there is no known hype about 'idea vs opportunity' in the public eye, it doesn't really matter what time of the year to post it. This would be an action (writing and publishing the blog post) that has come straight from idea (the subject of the blog post).
If however, I was a news blog/website, I would know as all of these websites do, that the most opportune time for a new story to go public - is almost immediately (opportunity). With so many competitors, news corporations know that it is best to get a new story out to the public before any of their competitors. This would be known as the 'opportune time' for them. They know that people don't like to read old news.
Conclusion