Problem or Puzzle?

The facts matter. The frame matters too.

Many nonfiction books today started as Substack essays. Some of them should have stayed that way. They didn’t need to become 50,000 words when 1,000 would have done the job.

Other books earn their length. I find myself highlighting line after line and thinking, I’m definitely using that in a future video. One new book I keep returning to is Brad Stulberg’s The Way of Excellence.

Stulberg describes how his weightlifting partner started saying “brave new world” before a big lift. Stulberg adopted the phrase, even outside the gym, because it “shifts me from a tense, closed state of fear into a more playful and open state of curiosity.”

We’re less focused on the negative when entering a brave new word. A few words can change how we meet the moment in front of us.

I have found this in my own life. Asking myself “bitter or better?“ can change how I approach a hard situation. What was weighing me down becomes the raw material for growth.

Some of this might sound like the kind of thing you’d read in one of those self-help-books-that-should-have-been-essays. But there’s Scriptural backing for it.

The Letter of James puts it more bracingly than any productivity author would dare: “Whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance” (1:2-3).

I don’t always remember to tell myself “nothing but joy” when something difficult lands in front of me, but I’m grateful when I do. The difficulty is the same either way. The only question is whether I treat it as a problem to escape or a joyful puzzle to figure out.