Problems are the step to takes you to the next level | By Sawan Kumar | Best Career Coach

If you look back at the periods of greatest growth in your life, they almost always coincide with periods of significant difficulty. Not because difficulty is good in itself, but because difficulty is the specific condition in which new capability is built. Easy circumstances produce performance of existing capability. Difficult circumstances build new capability.This is not a motivational point. It’s a functional one. When you’re facing a problem you can’t solve with your current resources, you have three options: avoid it and stay at your current level, outsource it and stay at your current level, or engage with it and potentially develop the capability to solve it. Only the third option produces growth, and it requires tolerating the discomfort of not knowing how to solve something that matters.In my career, the problems that developed me most weren’t the ones I was good at. They were the ones that exposed gaps — in my knowledge, my skills, my judgment, my relationships. Each gap, engaged with seriously, became a capability I now have and draw on constantly. The problems I avoided when I could — the difficult conversations, the financially uncertain periods, the technical challenges outside my comfort zone — left gaps that I found later, often at worse timing.In 2026, with AI transforming professional landscapes rapidly, the problems professionals are encountering are often genuinely new — no standard playbook, no established best practice. These are high-grade growth opportunities. The professionals who engage with them seriously — who tolerate the discomfort of not knowing, who iterate toward solutions — are developing capabilities that will be scarce and valuable when the dust settles.