"When you can't solve the problem, manage it"
About this Quote
Schuller’s line has the sleek efficiency of a coping mantra, but it’s also a quiet rebrand of failure. “Solve” is the fantasy of clean endings; “manage” is the lived reality of chronic stress, grief, addiction, debt, illness, and the thousand smaller frictions that don’t yield to a single breakthrough. The pivot in the sentence is the admission “can’t” - not “won’t” or “haven’t yet.” It grants permission to stop treating every hardship like a math equation and start treating it like weather: something you prepare for, track, and outlast.
As a clergyman, Schuller wasn’t just offering self-help; he was selling a theologically friendly pragmatism. Mid-to-late 20th-century American Christianity, especially the upbeat, broadcast-ready kind Schuller helped popularize, often tried to reconcile faith with the managerial mindset of modern life. The subtext is pastoral triage: if the miracle doesn’t arrive, your life still has to function. That’s not cynicism; it’s a doctrine of resilience dressed in plain language.
The line works because it shifts the metric of virtue. Success becomes endurance, adaptation, maintenance - the unglamorous work of keeping a marriage afloat, staying sober, living with anxiety, caring for an aging parent. It also contains a risk: “manage it” can slide into settling, a moral permission slip to normalize what might actually need confrontation or structural change. Schuller’s genius is that he leaves that tension unresolved, which is exactly how most problems feel.
As a clergyman, Schuller wasn’t just offering self-help; he was selling a theologically friendly pragmatism. Mid-to-late 20th-century American Christianity, especially the upbeat, broadcast-ready kind Schuller helped popularize, often tried to reconcile faith with the managerial mindset of modern life. The subtext is pastoral triage: if the miracle doesn’t arrive, your life still has to function. That’s not cynicism; it’s a doctrine of resilience dressed in plain language.
The line works because it shifts the metric of virtue. Success becomes endurance, adaptation, maintenance - the unglamorous work of keeping a marriage afloat, staying sober, living with anxiety, caring for an aging parent. It also contains a risk: “manage it” can slide into settling, a moral permission slip to normalize what might actually need confrontation or structural change. Schuller’s genius is that he leaves that tension unresolved, which is exactly how most problems feel.
Quote Details
| Topic | Management |
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