“I’ve got a problem.”

The young man had just come up to Dr. Norman Vincent Peale on Fifth Avanue in New York City, grabbed him by the lapels and said, “Dr. Peale, please help me. I can’t handle my problems. They’re just too much.”

Dr. Peale said, “Look, I’ve got to give a talk. If you’ll let go of my lapels, I’ll show you a place where there are people with no problems.”

The man said, “If you could do that, I’d give anything to go there.”

Dr. Peale said, “You may not want to go there, once you see the place. It’s just 2 blocks away.”

They walked up to the Forest Lawn cemetery and Dr. Peale said, “Look, there are 150,000 people in there. I happen to know that none of them has a problem.”

This is one of Dr. Peale’s favorite stories. There are ‘problems’ anywhere in our life. Unless you’re dead, you’ll face with problems everyday. The thing is, problems are a sign of life. If you have a big problem, be thankful for it. It proves that you’re still alive and functioning.

Some say, in fact, that the best way to judge a person is by the size of the problems he or she has. So you see, it is all about dealing with problems. If you know how to deal with problems effectively, you can achieve much more in your life.

Problems are often opportunities in disguise. Let me tells you another great real-life story about dealing with problems and having the lack of confident in life. This story, happened on one of the great author and self-help guru, Mark Victor Hansen (the author of Chicken Soup For The Soul) and a guy named Malcolm.

Mark was given a talk in Vancouver, a few years ago, and he happened to notice a man sitting in the front row who had the most mangled face he’d ever seen. He had stitches all the way across his face. One eyelid was stitched shut. Even his mouth was three-quarters stitched shut.

Mark remembers when he was talking about the importance of hugging, and at the break Malcolm came up and hugged Mark. With a raspy voice he said, “My name’s Malcolm.” Mark could tell from Malcolm’s tone that he expected to be recognized, but if Mark had seen him before, he didn’t know where or when.

He said, “I’m the guy who wrote you that letter.” He started telling Mark about it, and Mark remembered immediately. He had written that some ten years ago, he and his fiancee had been walking one weekend through the north woods of British Columbia minding their own business.

Somehow they had gotten between a mama bear and her baby cubs. The mama, just wanting to protect her cubs, had grabbed hold of his fiancee. Malcolm is just 5 feet 2 inches tall and the bear was enormous, but he felt courage and managed to disentangle his fiancee, whereupon the mama bear grabbed him and proceeded to crush every major bone in Malcolm’s body.

She finished by sinking her claws in his face and ripping straight across it, back toward the scalp.

It’s amazing that Malcolm lived. He was in restorative surgery for the next 8 years. By that time the doctors had done all the cosmetic surgery they could do. It hadn’t helped much, and he saw himself as an ugly person. He didn’t want to expose himself to society.

So he went in his wheelchair to the tenth-floor roof of his rehabilitation center and was ready to push himself over the edge when his father appeared. His father had heard an intuitive voice telling him to go see his son.

Just in time, his father came running up to the top of the stairs and said, “Wait a second, son.”

Malcolm turned around in the wheelchair. “What, Dad?”

His father said, “Malcolm, every human being has scar tissue deep inside him somewhere. Most of us wear it under a smile, some cosmetics and nice attire. You get to wear yours on the outside. But we’re all the same.”

Malcolm could no longer thrust himself off that building.

A short time later a friend of his brought him tapes of Mark’s public appearances. He started listening and heard the story Mark tells of Paul Jeffers, who lost his hearing at age 42 and has now become one of the most outstanding salesmen in the world. Mark heard it when Paul said, “Setbacks are given to ordinary people to make them extraordinary.”

Malcolm said to himself, “That’s me, I am extraordinary!”

He wrote down what he wanted to do. He dreamed about it and told everyone about it. Then he went out and got a job in insurance sales, a job where he has to expose his appearance to people everyday. He puts his picture on his business cards, hands them to people and said, “I’m ugly on the outside, but I’m beautiful on the inside if you just get a chance to know me.”

In 1987, Malcolm became the number one insurance agent in Vancouver. Fate had dealt him a terrible hand to play. But he turned it into a golden opportunity.

You see, what Malcolm learned was that his looks weren’t his problem. It wasn’t his appearance that held him back. That was just an excuse. In life, one has excuses or results. It was his vision of himself that was the problem. If he saw himself as beautiful. Then he was beautiful.

Once Malcolm ‘saw’ what he really looked like, his scars became irrelevant. Once he broke through his fears by opening himself up to others, he was able to move forward with astounding results. So can you.

This is an inspiring story. Do you dare to fail? Do you have what it takes to achieve the things that you want in your life?

Or do you give excuses and not doing anything to achieve your dreams? All the problems happen on you are problems only because you ‘see’ them as problems. If you ‘see’ them as opportunities, then they will become opportunities.

When something bad happen on you, it doesn’t mean that you’re going to fail. Sometimes when something bad happens, it turned out to be an opportunity.

I hope this story inspired you and drove you into taking more action to create a better life. Remember, problems are opportunities in disguise, you need to have problems to prove your ability and show that you’re still alive.