Last Saturday, I watched a movie called Deep Water. It’s about a plane crash where the survivors are stuck in the ocean and have to deal with sharks.

But with all the action and sea creatures, one part in the cockpit grabbed me.

The plane was going down fast, and it was scary. The alarms are going off, lights are flashing, as the plane heads for the ocean. There is panic everywhere.

The junior captain, overwhelmed by the cascading technical failures, checked the dashboard. He turned to the senior captain, and shouted:

“This is not working! That is not working!”

He was doing what most of us would do in a crisis: reporting the failures. But the senior captain didn’t join in the panic. Instead, he replied with a sentence that stuck with me:

“Don’t tell me what is broken. Tell me what is working.”

That line is a profound lesson in how we navigate our own lives.

Life has a way of throwing massive turbulence at us. It’s easy to get stuck on one problem when things go bad. We zero in on what’s missing, what didn’t work out, or what’s falling apart. We ignore what’s working.

You need serious courage to stop looking at the disaster. When 99 things are failing, it feels counterintuitive to look for the one thing that is still intact. But that is what you must do. We have to look at and work with the one thing that is still working.

Now, you might wonder: Did positive thinking save the plane?

No, the plane still crashed into the ocean.

By choosing to focus on and use what was still working, the senior captain reduced the force of the impact, allowing some people to make it out alive.

Focusing on what you have gives you the leverage to control the impact. It gives you a fighting chance to survive the wreckage and swim to the surface.

Now, I am asking you, “What is still working in your life right now?”

Find it and work with it.

Until tomorrow,

Oluboba Ayodeji