There’s a trap you can fall into when you’re working really, really hard for something. Sometimes you’re striving so diligently for something in a specific way that you miss that it’s come to you in a different way entirely. You’ve focused on the task rather than the result, and you don’t even realize you’ve gotten the result!
As a general rule, any time you’re really intense about something, stop every day or so and make sure you say “I’m working this hard because I want XYZ to happen. What would it look like if that happened in another way?”
We focus so much on what’s going out, we sometimes miss what’s coming in.
The Opportunity Machine 