Problems and Challenges

I am not sure when it became politically incorrect to use the word “problem” and instead use the word “challenge”.  I am guessing it was around the same time as they started giving trophies to all the players on a kids team.  Even the ones who lost.   What do you have to reach for if you get a trophy even when you’re a loser??  But I digress.  That’s a topic for a whole other post...

I cannot stand the word “challenge” when it’s used in place of the word “problem”.   Seriously, when did the word “problem” become a bad word?  A four-letter word?  Or a negative word?  I propose that the word “challenge” and the word “problem” aren’t even interchangeable, and every time I hear it in the workplace (oh…EVERY DAMN DAY), it is being used incorrectly.  It makes me cringe.

Problems are a part of life.  Sometimes everyday life.   We don’t chose to have problems, but sometimes we have them anyhow.  My father always told me that a problem was just something in search of a solution.  If no solution exists, then there really isn’t a problem to begin with.

People chose to challenge themselves, though, don’t they?   Absolutely.   Do you want to run a marathon?  There’s a challenge if I ever heard one.  But I don’t think you’d be able to find someone who decides to train for a marathon who would tell you that they have a “problem” they are trying to solve, which is training for a marathon.   Nope.  Don’t think so.  I can say it like that over and over again and it just never rolls nicely off the tongue.

Now, if while you’re CHALLENGING yourself, to run this marathon and you develop shin splints, then THAT would be a problem.  What’s wrong with calling that a “problem”?  That’s what it IS. This isn’t a bad thing.  Well, shin splints suck, but you just have to figure out what’s causing them, and what you can do to make them stop.   Perhaps the answer to this problem is to change your stride.  Perhaps it’s the sneakers you’re wearing and you need to change it up a bit.   Whatever the solution is to the problem of shin splints might make the challenge of running the marathon a little bit easier to accomplish.  Ya trackin’?

If nothing I’ve written here convinces you that the word “problem” isn’t blasphemy and that the word “challenge” isn’t used properly 90% of the time in both corporate America and in menial government work, then I ask you to consider this…

Tom Hanks—Apollo 13:  “Houston, we have a challenge.”