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John couldn’t get sleep that night as his mind kept wondering. He jumped out of his bed and ran towards his friend .  “David. Will you tell me where I can find diamonds?” “Diamonds? What do you want with diamonds?” “I want to be immensely rich, but I don’t know where to go.”

Once he got the directions, he left to the unknown land in search of diamonds leaving his family and property behind, never to return back again.

Months later, John’s son was ploughing the field when his axe hit something. He took that curious pebble into the house and left it inside.

Few days later David came in for a visit when he saw that flash of light “Here is a diamond. Has John returned?” “No. John has not returned and that is not a diamond; it is just a stone I got from our garden”  “No. I am sure.That is a diamond”

Together they rushed to the garden to stir up the white sand with their fingers. Within minutes, they were standing in front of the most magnificent diamond mine mankind had ever seen.

Had John remained at home and dug in his own garden instead of wondering unknown lands, that would result in his wretchedness, starvation, poverty and death, he would have had “acres of diamonds” — for every acre, yes, every shovelful of that old farm after wards revealed the gems which since have decorated the crowns of monarchs.

We usually fail to see diamonds which are right under our reach. How many untouched books are there in our home library? How about an excellent job opportunity and we end up attending it unprepared? How about given an opportunity to work with great minds and not to extract the best of them?

All of us want to earn money, build a great career and live a happy life. To do this, we look for opportunities. But most of the time we unknowingly miss recognizing them when it is right under his nose.

Entrepreneurs recognize opportunities and act on them. Still a student, Microsoft co-founder Bill gates saw a great business opportunity while reading January 1975 Popular Electronics magazine issue that demonstrated the Altair 8800 and this would later lead him to amass a fortune of $51 billion to give him the title of “the worlds richest man” for eleven consecutive year.

While at the University of Texas at Austin, Michael Dell saw the same opportunity when he started a computer company called PC’s Limited in his room in Dobie Center. This company would later become Dell Inc, an American technology-company employing more than 78,700 people worldwide.

Sergey bin and Larry page, two doctoral students, saw the same opportunity while building their new search engine leading to the birth of Google, a company which is ranked by Forbes magazine as the first among the top 100 companies to work for in 2007.

How many of us utilize the resources available to us. We might have the best library in our city, but many of us have never utilized it to his or her best.

If there is something we need, it is right in front of us.  A diamond mine is there in front of us, which if tapped, can change our life for ever. But, we never see them, and they remain hidden from us throughout our life.

If we fail in our life, it is because we didn’t use the opportunity given to us. We cannot blame our environment for our failure.  As we our-self is responsible for not making the best of our environment.

We got a wonderful learning opportunity with us, but never cared to learn or use the best out of it.

We would have got a wonderful parent, but we never treat them in the way they should be respected and honored.  We look for love all around us, but we fail to see the love of our parents towards us, and we put them in old age homes.

We have got immense opportunities under our feet,  just that - we need to open our eyes, and decide to use them to our best.  Once we decide to put our diamonds to the best use, we are right on our way to leave a legacy behind- a legacy that will change you and the world forever.