The Best Horse Sense

Is your job full of problems or puzzles?
 
When I was at the end of my last job as a computer nerd, I was dreaming of making a living working with horses. It seemed like in my job all that faced me each day were a string of problems. Some of them were problems I could not solve. The stress was making me ill.
 
I dreamed of spending my days with horses. When I am playing with a horse and trying to figure out how to get him to perform some task, my sense of time just falls away. The more difficult the task, the more interesting it is. It’s not a problem. It’s a puzzle.
 
In self-help books about business, they say, "Turn your problems into opportunities." If your customer is upset, take the problem and turn it around into an opportunity to make him happy. I thought it was just rah-rah, self-help empty encouragement that wore off as soon as you put down the book or left the seminar. It was all a bunch of empty promises.
 
One evening, though, while I was discussing with a friend all of my problems at work, I had a revelation. The realization was that if you are in a situation where all you see are problems, the issue is not that you have to turn them into opportunities.
 
The problem is that you are in the wrong job.
 
If something is not going exactly right, and you can throw yourself into the solution with gusto and joy without any effort, you’re in the right job. If you only see puzzles and not problems, you’re in the right job. If you have to make yourself face situations and see them as problems, you’re not doing what you love, and you are in the wrong job.
 
I quit my job within a month after that.
 
I used to be able to throw myself into computer problems. To me, they were puzzles. Frankly, I got tired of those issues, and they became problems. Conversely, my former boss tackles puzzles with financing deals that have millions of dollars attached to them. To him they are puzzles. To me, they would be huge problems. He’s in the right job, and I wouldn’t want to do what he does. When my tractor breaks, it’s a problem, but for my mechanic, it’s a puzzle. When my wife and I published a magazine, almost everything we were presented with was a problem. There were no puzzles. It only took us five years and a lot of money to figure out that we were in the wrong business.
 
Now that I am working to promote my business of teaching leadership through horsemanship, I have very few problems. Almost everything I do is a puzzle. I know I am in the right business.
 
The key to being happy in your job is not in turning problems into puzzles. The key is being in a job that you like so much that there are no problems. Only puzzles.