Leadership Quote by Robert H. Schuller

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.