Recently I had a setback. Doesn't matter what on; setbacks happen. Sometimes they're on things outside your control: if a meteor smacks the Earth and the tidal wave is on its way to you, well, you're out of luck buddy.
But sometimes it only seems like a tidal wave about to wipe out all life. Suppose your party has lost the election. Your vote didn't stop it. You feel powerless - but you're not. You can vote. You can argue. You can volunteer. Even run for office yourself.
Even then, it might be a thirty year project to get yourself or people you like elected President - but most problems aren't trying to change the leader of the free world. The reality is, most of the things that do happen to us are things we can partially control.
So the setback happens. I got upset, thinking about this misfortune. I try to look closely at situations and to honestly blame myself for everything that went wrong. By honestly blame, I mean to look for my mistakes, but not exaggerate their impact.
In this case, at first, I thought I saw many things I did wrong, but the more I looked, the more I realized that most of what I did was right, and only a few of them were wrong, and they didn't account for all the bad things that had happened beyond my control.
Then I realized: what if I treated those bad things as actual problems?
A disaster is something bad that happens. A problem is a situation that can be fixed. A situation that has a solution. At work, and in writing, I'm constantly trying to come up with solutions to problems, solutions which sometimes must be very creative.
"Treat setbacks as problems," I thought. "Don't complain about them (ok, maybe do) but think about how you can fix them." Of course, sometimes the specific problems are unfixable: the code failed in production, the story was badly reviewed. Too late.
That's when the second idea comes in: what if you treated problems as opportunities to better your skills?
An opportunity is a situation you can build on. At work, and in writing, I try to develop better and better skills to solve problems, be it in prose, code, organization, or self-management. And once you know a problem can happen, you can build skills to fix it.
So I came up with a few mantras: "Take Problems as Opportunities" and "Accept Setbacks as Problems" were a couple of them that I wrote down (and don't have the others on me). But I was so inspired I put together a little inspirational poster.
I don't yet know how to turn this setback into a triumph. But I do know what kinds of problems caused it, and those are all opportunities for me to learn new skills to try to keep this setback from happening again. Time to get to it.
-Anthony
Pictured: me on a ridge of rock, under my very own motivational poster.
P.S. Now that I've posted this, I see I'm not the first to come up with this phrase. Great minds think alike!
Readers of this blog know I'm a cat lover, and the favorite of our cats is Gabby, a loquacious gold cat that followed us home as a kitten and now is a fifteen pound fur monster.
One of his quirks is to follow you into the bathroom when you take a shower, and then to meow plaintively during the whole time you're running the water. If you peek out of the shower at him, Gabby has what can only be described as an expression of concern on his furry little face, meowing harder. When you get out of the shower, he stands up and reaches for you with his paws.
This behavior was mysterious until I had a brain flash the other day: we got Gabby when he followed us home … after two weeks of heavy rain. Clearly he'd been cared for, as he knew people very well --- but we could never find his original owners.
Then it all clicked: he lost his family in the rain … and doesn't like the sound of the shower because he's afraid he'll lose us too.
Don't worry, Gabby. We have no plans to leave you.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Gabby and me, standing in front of my wife's art.
Update: well, this isn't really an update, I'm just testing a Facebook integration feature. 
