It may seem quite ironic and illogical, but the reality is that problems can be a very good thing. Such a good thing in fact that you should welcome problems whenever they knock on your door. While the majority of the population try to avoid problems at all costs, highly successful people know that there is immense wealth & knowledge into facing problems head on. Let me elaborate why you should always welcome problems:
Points out what is not working
Whenever a problem rears its ugly head, it’s a signal that something is clearly not working and needs to be fixed. This is why you should always view problems as a barometer to measure how well things are going. Nothing ever runs perfectly, so instead of letting the problem destroy and demoralize you, greet it with open arms and pay attention to what is not functioning properly, so that you can then take action. For example, let’s say your marketing campaign for your business suddenly does not provide the same results it usually does. Instead of crying fowl and complaining, use this issue to figure out what suddenly changed in the landscape of your business that may have caused this. Some industries even look for problems! Take the software industry, where hackers are even hired to hack into systems so that they can figure out the problems with their program. Always take problems that arise as a way to pinpoint something that is not working as it should be.
Opportunity to improve
Once you know what is not working, you have the chance to make things right. Here is your opportunity to improve a process and thus make it better, stronger, more lucrative, and so on. Once you know what is not working, your ability to take action and improve the situation will dictate how well you end up succeeding. I know people that are aware of issues that they have, yet they do absolutely nothing to improve it. One example, someone that finds out that their poor eating habits and lack of exercise is the reason for their high blood pressure or cholesterol problems. This person knows what is clearly not working, yet chooses status quo. Guess how successful this person will be into getting healthier? If that software company I mentioned earlier would choose status quo after finding out flaws in their security, how successful would their software be? It would be a bomb, just like this person bombed at getting healthier. Problems give you the opportunity to improve…don’t turn a blind eye to this opportunity, take it & march on at full speed ahead. This is the only way to ensure that you keep on succeeding.
Learn a lesson
Within every obstacle that we face, there is a lesson to be taken away from it. When you are faced with a problem, instead of taking it personally and crumbling underneath its perceived weight, look for the silver lining, as in the lesson that you can take from it, so that you can avoid this same problem in the future. I know people that keep making the same mistakes over and over again, whether it be in their career or their personal relationships. These people are not successful because of that. Each time you learn a lesson from every problem you encounter, you are becoming more and more successful. By taking the software example from above, now that this company knows the flaws in their system and are fixing them, the lesson they have learned is to code the program differently in their future versions, as to avoid having these security issues again. It’s logical, and it works.
By applying this thinking into your everyday life, you will slowly move out of a phase of constant failures, to a state of never-ending improvements, which is necessary to achieve anything of value in this world. One of my favorite quotes is from Richard Nixon, which says “You learn from defeat, then you come back and you beat them the next time”. This embodies the fact that problems, obstacles, and failures are not the end of the road for you. They are merely bumps along the way. Become aware of them, take the given opportunity to improve, and learn a lesson from them. Once you master this art of perceiving problems as non-negative and actually welcome them whenever they arise, you will not only increase the quality of your existence, but you will also increase the level of success that you achieve.
