I view obstacles as opportunities to achieve more.

Sometimes an obstacle is only an obstacle. The visa gets denied, the funding falls through, and calling that an opportunity too quickly is a way of skipping past a real loss. What holds more reliably is narrower: an obstacle contains information. It shows you where the system is tight, what you had assumed, who actually decides.

The three weeks a permit takes tells you something about the process that the brochure left out.

When you hit one today, before deciding how to feel about it, ask what it just taught you that you didn't know this morning.