"Every problem contains within itself the seeds of its own solution"

A friend recently forwarded to me a PowerPoint file with a story called "A Story about Two Pebbles", the moral of which is that "a solution exists for most problems, it's just that we don't always know how to examine all of the angles of the situation".

I remember a very similar quote from Norman Vincent Peale's book Enthusiasm Makes the Difference. "Every problem contains within itself the seeds of its own solution", this eleven-word formula by Stanley Arnold, is considered by Peale as "a masterpiece of insight and fact". Stanley Arnold was the president of Stanley Arnold & Associates, Inc., a company whose function is to contrive novel ways for its clients to increase the sales of their products. His clients, include Goodyear, United Airlines and some thirty other giant corporations, employed his company as the "idea factory". According to Peale, many business leaders who had employed Arnold's problem-solving talents regarded him as "America's idea man number one".

Stanley Arnold once stated that "the first essential for success is a client with courage, imagination, and detrmination". I can see how these two quotes of his complement each other beautifully. One needs courage to have the conviction that there are the seeds of solution in every problem. Then one needs determination and imagination to find out what those seeds are, just like what the moral of the PowerPoint story says, that we need to "know how to examine all of the angles of the situation".