Enjoy Your Problems, Understand Your Problems, Learn From Your Problems

In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain tells the delightful story of how Tom gets all the other boys in the neighborhood to paint his fence for him.

He has been told that he can’t go fishing until the fence is painted. What a chore!

When the other boys ask if he is going, he basically says, “Why on earth would I want to go fishing? I have a fence to paint. Nothing is more fun than painting a fence.”

He actually gets the other boys to pay him for the right to paint his fence.

Enjoy the process of solving the problem.

Enjoy the process!
Whistle while you work. Make it fun. No, make it outrageously fun.

Ask yourself, “What could I do to really enjoy this?”

When we had to write 101 books in 101 days, we asked the same question. It was a huge task, and it felt completely overwhelming. We ended up in a villa in the Maldives, surrounded by our best friends in the world, looking out over crystal blue waters, and singing songs at night.

We enjoyed the process, and you can get the books!

Learn the Lesso

In the end, we only get the problems we need. That is a hard nugget to swallow, but so true.

We only get the problems we need!

Each problem that we encounter in life has been given to us as a gift to teach us a lesson, to impart unto us pearls of wisdom, that which in ancient times was called the Pearl of Great Price.

It is something so precious that it cannot be shown to others.

It can only be had by those who have paid the price of having the problem and learning directly from it the lesson it has to teach.

Now if you don’t learn the lesson, you get to keep the problem.

As soon as you learn the lesson, the problem goes away, and you get to wear the Pearl.

Ask yourself, what is the lesson this problem is trying to teach me?

Think about it. Ponder it. Give the lesson the same thought that you give to getting the problem to go away—they are, after all, one and the same thing.