Do not regard your opportunities as mere visages floating in the horizon of your life, or autumn leaves driven by the winds of chance across your path. Every opportunity far from being a thing of chance, is a product of definite causes. Opportunity is unrealized possibility supplemented by conditions favorable for the execution of a purpose. And the power lies within you to create circumstances. That skillful artist, the human brain, draws a mental picture--an idea, the judgment approves, the will renders a decision to create that idea into actual being; in other words, gives it a soul, and then we have opportunity made real by the process of a creative force. We are apt to regard this quality in our existence as a somewhat superhuman term, an abstraction beyond the realm of common life, or at most an asset within the reach of a favored few; whereas it is a common attribute playing a potential part in our every-day activities. In its very nature opportunity is democratic and goes, like a wayfarer, knocking at the gates of every man's life. This messenger of fate, however, will not knock at the door of that man who is unable to meet the demands it would make upon him. It ever recognizes the eternal fitness of things, since it looks to its own promotion as well as the promotion of him who seeks to embrace it. Opportunity, then, is not opportunity at all if a man is not equal to it. When the steam engine lay in its elementary state in the great laboratory of nature, it was an opportunity for James Watt; and by his accepting it, opportunity realized its own fulfillment, became its own blessing and a blessing to all mankind. The unskilled laborer who dug out the ore could not claim this opportunity because he was not equal to its requirements. Moreover, every man is himself an opportunity of infinite greatness. And he who depends upon the world alone to furnish him opportunities is destined to meet with failure. Self-reliance is the passport to success. The man who is continually bemoaning a lack of opportunity acknowledges his own lack of resources--is wanting in creative force. Every golden moment is an opportunity for him to step out from the shadows into the sunshine. Optimism sees opportunity in the ordinary jog-trot of daily duty.