Maintain a solution orientation rather than a problem orientation.
Focusing on problems drains energy. Apply your creativity, spirit, and enthusiasm toward the development of solutions.

Recently I was visiting my son Ben, a college sophomore, and had the opportunity to take him out to dinner with several of his friends. It was late spring and the students had just completed registration for the fall semester, so this was fresh on their minds. As we waited for our order, I listened to the students compare notes about their experience.
The first friend told about how frustrated he was that two of the classes he wanted were closed out before he could enroll in them. A second student quickly pointed out that the same thing had happened to him last semester. Not to be outdone, a third friend chimed in with his tale of woe, telling us how he was locked out of a key class he needed, and even worse, it was a core requirement for his major. For the next 20 minutes, I listened to their complaints about the unfairness of the registration process and how stupid the administration was for not fixing it.
Does this sound familiar to you? For some reason, most of us (myself included) love to indignantly describe how we were mistreated or wronged. In fact, the more preposterous the mistreatment, and the more justified we feel in our complaint, the more we love to share the story. But is this helpful?
After dinner, I dropped Ben’s friends off on campus, and he and I went out for dessert. As we sat outside on a beautiful April evening, we talked about the dinner conversation. In particular, we discussed how this Fundamental (yes, my kids hear about the Fundamentals too!) related to their registration experience. Ben could readily see how draining and tiresome it was to hear the complaints.
When I asked him what he could do if he got closed out of an important class, he could easily think of several possible options. He could talk to the professor to see if he could get an exception to be added. He could talk to his advisor to enlist her assistance. He could take another required class and see if the class he originally wanted had any cancellations once the semester began. In fact, the more Ben focused on possible solutions, the more ideas came to his mind.

We See What We’re Looking For
Here’s an interesting phenomenon: Have you even noticed that when you buy a new car, suddenly you begin to see that same make and model everywhere you look? Or when you learn a new word, somehow it magically begins showing up in books and magazines all around you? Ever wonder why that happens? Let me try to explain and then show you how it relates to this Fundamental.
Every moment that you’re awake, your five senses are picking up signals from an infinite number of stimuli. Take just a moment right now and listen to all the different sounds that you can hear. You might hear people talking around you. And the hum of an air-conditioner or heater running. And there may be music playing. There are probably dozens of separate sounds you can pick up if you listen carefully; and the same thing is true for your other senses.
If you were consciously aware of all of these different sensory inputs at the very same time, you’d probably literally go crazy. It would overload your brain’s ability to process it all, and it would likely overwhelm you. To protect you from this state, and to help you make sense of your world, your brain prioritizes the sensory inputs, putting some of them in the foreground and the rest in the background. For example, if you’re in a conversation with someone, you pay attention to their voice and put the sound of the HVAC system in the background where you don’t even notice it. This enables you to focus.
What criteria does your brain use to prioritize the inputs and select what to put in the foreground versus the background? It prioritizes based on where you put your thoughts. Let’s go back to the new Honda you just bought. There were just as many Hondas on the road last week as there are today. However, now that you have one, your attention is on them and your mind is moving them to the foreground where you notice them more easily. Whatever you put your thoughts and attention on, your mind will begin to reveal to you (even though it’s really been there all along).
This is why people often say that when you make up your mind about what you’re looking for, it will appear. If you put all of your thought and attention on that which you want, you begin to see pathways to make it happen that you simply hadn’t even noticed before. They had merely been pushed to the background because your focus was elsewhere.

Problems or Solutions?
Now let’s apply this recognition to problems and solutions. Ben’s college friends were so focused on how stupid and unfair the registration process was, and commiserating with their buddies, that they were blind to solutions that may have been right in front of them. Their brains left those in the background as it prioritized their worlds.
In contrast, Ben’s thoughts and attention were on how he could get the class he wanted, not how unfair it all was. As a result, his brain allowed him to notice a variety of possible avenues he might pursue to solve the problem. It put those opportunities in the foreground where they could more easily be seen.
Remember that we’ll find pretty much what we’re looking for. If our attention is primarily oriented toward the problem, solutions tend to remain hidden or obscured. When we learn to focus our attention on solutions, a myriad of possibilities inevitably appears.
Be a solution-seeker, not a problem-dweller.