Seth Godin recently wrote about differentiating problems from situations.
I think it’s a game-changer. It makes me feel much more accepting of things that used to frustrate me, and direct my energy to where I can have an impact.
Here’s the basic idea:
Problems are things we can solve - they have solutions. The solutions might be really hard, and have significant trade-offs, but they’re there.
Situations don’t have solutions. We just need to live with them.
We often confuse the two.
Examples of situations
Let’s say you’re an in-house lawyer and your CEO doesn’t seem to care too much about managing serious risk.
That’s a situation you need to accept, not a problem you can solve. Any frustration or time spent on that is pretty much wasted.
Same with company culture. If you join a very established company who views the legal team as a cost centre who should be ignored, involved too late and distrusted, that’s a situation. You can try to solve it, but I’ve rarely seen that work that culture is deeply ingrained.
Better to either leave the company, or stay and accept the situation so you don’t burn your precious energy getting angry about it.
It’s about shifting focus from impossible battles to achievable wins.
Problems are likely hard
But if it’s a problem, solving it won’t be a walk in the park either.
Problems that have been around for a while will by definition be hard to solve. As Seth Godin mentions in his post, all the easy ones will have been solved right away.
So that’s another thing to accept: problems that have been around for a while will usually take a lot of energy to solve and will involve tougher trade-offs.
We can then choose to either accept we’re not going to even attempt to solve the problem, or we can invest the time/energy to solve them. Either way we can manage our expectations.
Whenever I’ve made a conscious decision to accept a problem and not solve it, the problem usually bugs me a lot less. You might be the same!
How to build this muscle
Reflect on your last 2 weeks:
What annoyed you / kept you up at night?
Were they problems or situations?
If they were problems you can and will solve, then keep them in your mind.
If they were situations, or problems not worth solving: feel free to release them and stop thinking about it.
Thanks for being here,
Daniel