Imagine a great marathon runner who gets to the 40th mile and thinks, “Oh but I’m tired,” and stops running. Imagine one of the great women who decided that they too had to run marathons, no matter how or when: imagine if they had convinced themselves that it was not worth it, that it was better to go on with their lives without so many hassles.
In the last newsletter (by the way, you signed up right?) Sandro mentioned Renzo Rosso, the founder of Diesel. Red used to say, “Problems make me happy,” meaning that problems are challenges to be overcome, they are not just obstacles and above all they are not insurmountable limits .
Personal evolution and individual improvement can be described by curves: you know a nice graph pointing upward? In the ordinates you put the things you do best and best and also your mood: the more obstacles you overcome, the more satisfaction you reap. If you looked with a microscope at that curve you would see that it is not continuous but is made up of steps: every time we improve in something we go up a step. Every time you learn how to do something you didn’t know how to do you go up one, every time you figure out how to do better something you already knew how to do you go up another.
Life is made up of stairs, isn’t it? It is said like this. However, there is another way of understanding the issue that is worth keeping in mind:
Never think “I can’t do it” but start thinking “I can’t do it yet”
Do you see how the perspective changes? From denial you move elegantly to possibility: okay, you can’t do it but maybe it’s because you haven’t tried yet, it’s not that you just can’t do it.
You’ve never run and now you’re running: you’ve learned to do something you didn’t know you could do. Now you know how to do it.
You have never made a good carbonara and now you know how to make it (although it will never be as good as Santopalato‘s).
There are so many things you didn’t know you knew or could do and now you know how to do. You can do them so naturally that you have forgotten how much it cost you to learn how to do them and how unnatural it was to succeed at all. You struggled.
Another way of looking at the problems
Problems are a nuisance or something you shy away from all the time, and instead you only need to shift your perspective a little to illuminate them in a different light: problems are challenges, not walls. You can bump into them but you can also decide to climb them. Or to beat them up and take them down, who knows. You can choose the way you want.
The important thing is, as always, the attitude you have. If you are surrendering and think it’s better to put your head down and keep doing what you’ve always done you will live comfortably but never evolve.
If you decide that the problems are challenges that you have not *yet* won and that you can overcome you will already know how to face them with a different and much more positive spirit.
The future
We are all facing uncertain days. It happens at this particular time but it can happen all the time in life. It is the uncertainty of the future and is ineradicable. You can only welcome it differently than you always have: what is unknown (because it has yet to happen) does not have to be scary: after all, it is a set of infinite possibilities.
It is up to you to seize them.