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Opportunities | Jun 30 2004

I feel better today. I wasn’t feeling so good for a while. I’m not exactly sure what I mean by “a while.” Months?

I had the idea to write about problems, but in the end all I wrote was this: “A problem is only a problem if it’s a problem.” That sounds cute, I know, but I didn’t mean it that way. I meant to mean that the only things that count as problems are the things one thinks of as problems. If you don’t think of something as a problem, it isn’t one.

When I was 16, my best friend confessed to feeling hurt whenever people called him Nose or Pickle, his nicknames then. (Nose referred to his nose, which was large, and Pickle referred to his jacket, which was green.) He wanted to know why I never got teased like this.

The reason, I told him, is that I didn’t mind being teased. This took all the fun out of teasing me. “You have to stop minding being teased,” I said, “and no one will tease you. Or even if they do, you won’t mind it anymore.”

You can just imagine how that went over. How do you stop minding something you mind?

Related: I once had a boss who refused to say the word problem. This was a technique he learned in a book on management. Whenever he wanted to say problem, he would say opportunity. At staff meetings he would talk at great length about all the opportunities the organization faced. However, since he still used the word opportunity to mean opportunity, you to had to figure out from context what he was talking about, a problem or an opportunity. Later he stopped using the word opportunity to mean problem, and would instead say challenge. Fortunately he wasn’t the sort of person to ever talk about challenges, so this was much easier to decipher.