“In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.” — Albert Einstein

Crisis as Gift

Benjamin Franklin astutely observed that you can be certain of nothing in life except death and taxes. He neglected to include perhaps the most inexorable of all life’s conditions — crisis. From the most powerful tycoon on Wall Street to the most deprived supplicant in Bangladesh, crisis will strike at some point. But I believe the key that can have a profound effect on our response is how we define crisis itself.

Take stroke as an example. It is the third leading cause of death in the United States. Consider what it would be like to suffer a stroke and be lucky enough to survive. How would you react, coming so close to losing all the aspects of life you hold so dear? All of a sudden, your family, friends, and pets are seen in a whole new light. Yesterday’s distractions become today’s insignificances. You realize that you failed to pay attention to your real needs and thus created the imbalances that set the stage for a stroke in the first place. The crisis becomes your gift.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche expressed this with characteristic directness: That which does not kill us makes us stronger. He was not romanticizing suffering. He was identifying the mechanism by which human beings grow. The crisis is not a punishment. It is a correction. It is the universe’s way of guiding us back to balance. And the person who can see it that way — who can receive the crisis as a teacher rather than an enemy — has already begun to heal.

Most people view crisis through a prism of fear. Fear constricts. It constricts your body and your mind. When the mind constricts, it fears taking chances, and when enough behavior becomes conditioned to avoid taking chances, growth ceases and fear wins. Staying safe and comfortable becomes the modus operandi. The problem is that living in fear of change leads to stagnation and grave imbalance. Crisis is the universe warning us to make necessary course corrections. You will find that the great crises in people’s lives are usually preceded by earlier promptings for change that went unheeded.

The Oracle at Delphi — an enduring pinnacle of wisdom for Western civilization — stipulated only two things: Know thyself, and Nothing in excess. If you know yourself and take charge consciously of making choices that serve your growth, your life will achieve a balance, and in that balance will come a harmony and a healthy life force that will not be creating crisis, for you will live every day in direct connection with your vital, true self.

The Architecture of Self-Sabotage

If you are overweight, you have not been paying attention. If your spouse wants a divorce, you have not been paying attention. Being unhealthy requires the same commitment as being healthy. A lot of energy goes into making the wrong choices day in and day out over time. Hundreds of thousands of incorrectly chosen mouthfuls of food, and thousands of days of denial about the necessity of exercise go into making a person obese. The underlying motivations take the same consistency of effort that a marathon runner exhibits, only in reverse. It takes the same energy and the same time commitment; the same rules apply. Every effect has a cause, and the same cause repeated over and over yields a consistent effect.

The science of epigenetics has now confirmed this at the molecular level. Your gene expression changes in response to your choices — what you eat, how you sleep, what you think, how much you move, what stress you carry. Chronic poor choices do not merely produce symptoms. They alter the biological instructions your body operates on. And those altered instructions can be passed to the next generation. You are not only sabotaging yourself. You are potentially encoding that sabotage into your children’s DNA.

Think how you got to where you are. Examine why you continued to make choices that you knew were going to cause a negative outcome. It is not an accident. It is intentional self-sabotage. It is intentional because you have to give the wrong path time, commitment, and energy. You have to give it emotion and a myriad of complex defense mechanisms to justify what you are doing. The ego justifies the bad mistake you are making.

The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre would call this bad faith — the act of pretending you had no choice when in fact you chose, deliberately and repeatedly, the path that brought you here. Not because you are stupid. Because the conditioned self is a genius at rationalization. It can make any destructive choice sound reasonable, any self-defeating pattern sound inevitable, any refusal to change sound like wisdom.

The Renaissance Approach

We generally do things we know we will not fail at. This fear of failure turns people into robots, doing the same things the same way, day in and day out. It takes a lot of courage to do something you do not know how to do. Look at yourself as a Renaissance person — trying everything, experimenting, experiencing. When you are no longer attached, you can do anything because you do not have to worry whether you win or lose. The process of doing is what matters and what honors life.

In 2026, the fear of failure has been amplified by the most public stage in human history. Every mistake can be recorded, shared, and archived permanently. A single failed attempt can become a viral humiliation. And the result is a generation that is more risk-averse, more perfectionistic, and more paralyzed by the possibility of public judgment than any that has preceded it. But the principle remains: growth requires failure. Mastery requires mistakes. And the person who never fails in public has almost certainly never tried anything worth doing.

The physicist Richard Feynman, who won the Nobel Prize, said that the first principle of science is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool. He applied this principle not just to physics but to life. He played bongo drums. He painted. He picked locks. He learned to draw. Not because he was good at these things but because the process of learning — of being bad at something and getting better — was itself the source of vitality. Feynman understood that the Renaissance approach is not about talent. It is about courage. The courage to be a beginner.

End the Distractions

Too often we distract ourselves instead of focusing. When we start a project, we look for something to distract us — the television, the radio, the phone, food — anything to avoid the diligence and patience necessary to master that project. When you are distracted you cannot focus, and when you cannot focus you do not have presence of mind in the moment.

The architecture of distraction has been industrialized since this essay was first written. The average American now spends over seven hours a day consuming digital media. Infinite scroll eliminates natural stopping points. Autoplay removes the decision to continue. Push notifications interrupt your chosen activity with manufactured urgency 96 times a day. AI can now generate an infinite stream of personalized content tailored precisely to your avoidance patterns. We have entered the era of bespoke distraction — distraction custom-fitted to the exact contours of your resistance to change.

The philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote three and a half centuries ago: All of humanity’s problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone. The room has not changed. But the number of devices in it designed to prevent stillness has multiplied beyond anything Pascal could have imagined.

In order to grow you must put an end to distractions and learn to focus. You have to be conscious in the moment, and then you have to create balance in that moment. The only way to get healthy and conquer self-sabotage is to figure out where you have allowed imbalance into your lives. When you wake up each day you have twenty-four hours of time. Give the appropriate amount of time necessary in each area of your life every day, and balance and growth, progress and achievement will be yours.

Albert Einstein said that if he could not play his violin every day, he could not think as well. Play is not a luxury. It is a biological necessity. Choose the play that gives you joy and happiness. Do not play based upon what someone else says is the right play. Reorganize your day so that no one tells you that your work is more important than your nourishment, your rest, or your joy.

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Dr. Gary Null is host of the nation’s longest running public radio program on alternative and nutritional health and a multi-award-winning documentary film director, including his recent Last Call to Tomorrow. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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