Read this line, Skip the pain

Here’s the full quote with the lines that come afterward as additional context:

“If it’s not actionable, it’s not a problem. It’s a situation, a circumstance, a fact of life. It may be a drag (so to speak), but like gravity, it’s not a problem that can be solved.” from Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans.

While it may be obvious as you read it, that first line can save all of us a lot of pain if we think about it before starting.

How many times in your life have you tried to change or fix something that, in hindsight, you were never really going to be able to change or fix? If you truly sat down and thought about it, could you have come to that conclusion before you started? I can think of three separate times in my life where I spent years trying to fix problems that were unfixable. Times where I would have been better off turning around and walking away than I would have to continue beating my head against that wall.

Looking back, it’s not even the time spent trying to fix the unfixable problem that I regret — it’s the opportunity cost. What could I have spent those years doing instead? What companies could I have helped grow or started if I hadn’t been trying to fix a gravity problem that was unfixable?

The most important question of all is this:

“What unfixable problems am I [foolishly] trying to fix right now?!?”

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.