Wit & Attitude Quote by Edward de Bono

De Bono is quietly taking a swing at one of modern culture’s most flattering myths: that great ideas are hidden treasure, and smart people are the ones who stumble upon them first. The line rejects the romance of discovery in favor of something more industrial and, frankly, more democratic. “Opportunity ideas” aren’t rare truffles in the forest; they’re manufactured goods. If you don’t build the factory, you don’t get the product.

The intent is practical but also corrective. De Bono’s career was a long argument against revering intelligence as mere critical horsepower. He wanted “lateral thinking” to be understood as a discipline: a set of techniques that generate options when the obvious route is blocked. So the quote works as a reframing of creativity from personality trait to repeatable process. It nudges you away from waiting for inspiration, away from the cult of the visionary, toward deliberate production: prompts, constraints, iteration, and purposeful wrong turns.

The subtext is a critique of passivity dressed up as optimism. “Waiting to be discovered” sounds humble, but it can be an alibi for inertia, especially in organizations that prize critique over invention. De Bono suggests that opportunity isn’t an external event; it’s an outcome of attention plus method.

Context matters: coming out of mid-to-late 20th-century management culture, his work addressed workplaces drowning in analysis and risk-aversion. This sentence is a managerial provocation and a personal challenge: stop acting like opportunity is fate. Treat it like a practice.