Great Opportunities Are Disguised As Massive Problems

If you really want to start tapping into what’s next, what’s available to you, and what’s possible for you, you need to solve the problems in your life. Ryan Holiday describes this as “the obstacle is the way”. Essentially he argues that you become someone new when you overcome something big, and that we must not back down from the challenge.

This is true in our personal lives and in business. On the personal side, it’s all about how you approach the problem. So you’re not exercising as much as you’d like to or managing your time very well. You’re not being fair and compassionate with the people that are most important to you...

You can avoid the problem and act like it’s not there, which will cause you to get the same outcomes. Or you can create an action-plan, face off with the problem, and resolve it. This might unearth a new problem that needs to be solved next, but at least it’s a step forward in making progress on the issue. All you can ever ask for is progress.

In business, we’re literally taught that the best business ideas solve the biggest problems. Our mission is to find something that is so painful, frustrating, inconvenient, or scary and help it be less so through a product or service. The bigger the problem, the more people are willing to pay to solve it and the greater the opportunity.

Solving problems is more of a mindset than a means to an end. There will always be problems in life, and if there aren’t, then your mind will find one. So either you can be paralyzed by the idea that things aren’t how you want them to be, or you can work toward reconciling your problems so that the nature of them changes. 

When you get consistent with conquering challenges they’ll start to have less power over you because you’ve proven that you are greater than them. This means that the visceral pull they have on you is weaker, and they’ll affect the quality of your life less. And furthermore, it means that you can reach that much higher and tap into even better opportunities because you’ve built resilience, conviction, and resolve.