The Exception And The Boy Who Cried Wolf
Welcome to our 3rd tip! In our last e-mail, “First In, First Out”, we discussed the fact that it’s a necessity to deal with the oldest items in your inbox first – no matter what – and only then handle the more recent ones progressively. This is absolutely true – with just one exception:
For most of us, life is not a quiet and boring road. It is exciting! But it also has an aspect which we all have a certain love/hate relationship with – PROBLEMS.
There are only two kinds of problems in this world: good problems and bad problems.
Good problems are those which challenge us but we still feel we can solve and we just love to tackle; while bad problems are those which we feel are overwhelming. We feel like we can’t solve them at all.
Many of us don’t want problems. If a genie could give you a life with no problems, it would sound like a good idea and you’d probably go for it. However, I can promise you – this would be a boring and useless life, and you would quickly call the genie right back and ask him to give you at least some issues to handle! People love problems because it makes life exciting and gives something to solve!
When you look at a problem and decide it is within your abilities to handle, you will embrace the problem and start handling it – it will no longer be considered a problem as such - it will become a challenge!
When you look at a problem and decide you can not solve it, you will ignore it, avoid it, run away from it or freak out. Any of these options are deadly for you and will always worsen the situation (time heals nothing). Of course there is an “option B” and that is to face and deal with the problem (this is always the correct option with anything in life). The moment you decide to tackle it will be the moment it turns from a
problem to a challenge.