Use the difficulty

Early in his career, Sir Michael Caine was preparing for one of his very first plays, rehearsing an important scene. He was offstage waiting for his moment to enter and two other actors were in the middle of a vibrant scene that got a bit out of hand. The actors were improvising and a chair ended up being tossed across the stage and jammed in the doorway.

This was the doorway that Caine was to use to enter the stage. But now it was blocked.

As it was just a rehearsal, Caine popped his head through the doorway and shouted to the director watching from the audience seats below.

“I’m sorry sir, I can’t get in.” Caine said.

“What do you mean?” the director shouted back.

“There is a chair here.”

“Use the difficulty,” the director said.

Caine had to ask for more information.

“Use the difficulty,” the director repeated. “If it’s a comedy fall over it, if it’s a drama, pick it up and smash it!”

Caine was being interviewed later in his career when he was recounting this story and he told the interviewer that it was a philosophy that he took beyond the stage and has used it throughout his entire life.

“Ask my family,” he said. “If anything bad happens, we always try to think about how we can use the difficulty. We have to think about what we can get out of it.”

I love this concept because it reinforces a huge theme of resilience. It’s a simple reminder that life throws unexpected obstacles in our way, and our success depends on how we handle them. And no doubt this philosophy has been a tremendous piece of Caine’s enduring success.

“The blazing fire makes flames and brightness out of everything thrown into it.” - Marcus Aurelius

A similar mantra comes from this beautiful quote from the great Roman Philosopher and Emperor Marcus Aurelius. He reminds us that a fire grows stronger the more we put into it. It begs the question we must ask ourselves when challenges arise: “how can I use this difficult situation to my advantage?”

Difficulties show up everywhere in life, whether they be personal or professional. And, if we can’t get past the metaphorical chairs that end up blocking our way, we’ll always be trapped.

Every difficulty has an opportunity to be leveraged.

Here are a couple of ways we can turn obstacles into opportunities.

Appreciate the beautiful constraints. If we can turn constraints into opportunities to be more creative, this is a tremendous advantage in life. Suddenly that tight deadline becomes a constraint that we can use to get hyper-focused. There is a law known as Parkinson’s Law which is a belief that work expands to fill the time that we have allocated to it. That means that if we give ourselves 3 weeks to do a project, we will almost always use that full three weeks, even if the work itself only takes one week. Could the opposite be true too? For example, if we bring forward the timeline to one week, could we do it with proper focus? I’m certain we could. Some of the best campaigns that I have been involved in are the ones where there was almost no budget - it forced the team to think differently and approach the problem with more creative freedom and risk-taking. When we use constraints as a mechanism to spark innovation, we actually set ourselves a playful challenge.

Reframe problems as opportunities. There are plenty of times that we have to deal with challenging clients, challenging team members, or maybe just challenging situations. And when I use the word ‘challenging’, that is exactly what they are - a challenge. But if we focus on the blockage, we expend important energy on the problem that could be re-directed towards coming up with a solution. These ‘challenges’ are just opportunities for us to push ourselves, to test our measure. We can take any situation and look at it as an opportunity to practice patience, negotiation, leadership or any other skill we want to develop. We get to choose if we see them as a lost cause (which means we have given up), or we could see them as an innovative way forward. All it takes is a few seconds to ask “how can I use this moment to improve my skills?” We can write down three ideas and commit to applying one of them within the following 24 hours.

I think this concept can be summed up nicely like this: “use the difficulty” = lean into it and get to work on a solution.

If the chair had landed perfectly that day, would Caine have ever learnt the concept of ‘use the difficulty’? We’ll never know, but it was an example of an imperfection leading to massive growth that he leveraged for the rest of his life.

Life is never perfect. In fact, mistakes and challenges are guaranteed in life. But difficulties aren’t just obstacles, they’re hidden opportunities for growth, creativity, and resilience. The more we practice using challenges to our advantage, the more naturally we turn setbacks into stepping stones.

Until next time friends, stay resilient!

Carre @ Resilient Minds