Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
— Theodore Roosevelt
On April 11, 1970, a Saturn 5 rocket carrying the Apollo 13 mission crew launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Their mission was to travel to land a second time on the moon.
However, three days into the mission during routine system testing, one of the oxygen tanks on the lunar module exploded. In the moment, what had been a mission to the moon immediately changed into a mission to bring the Apollo 13 crew home safely.
The Apollo 13 crew along with the supporting ground crew had major challenges and problems to solve. They also had very profound and explicit constraints on what materials and options they had available to solve these problems. They had to solve the problems in front of them with only what they had available on the lunar module.
One specific and inspiring example of the challenges faced on the Apollo 13 mission was a problem of a square peg in a round hole. During the Apollo 13 mission, at one point the crew realized that the carbon dioxide scrubbers on the lunar module were not working well. The crew had additional scrubbers on a different part of the ship, but they needed round filters and the alternate filters that were available were square.
To solve this problem, the ground crew had to find a way to make a square filter fit in a round hole using only the materials that were available on the lunar module, a truly daunting and high-stress engineering feat. The NASA engineers were able to successfully solve this and many other problems, eventually bringing the Apollo 13 astronauts home safely.
You too will also have times when you face challenges that seem insurmountable. When this happens, the best you can do is to start by doing what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Think of a daunting challenge you have in your life. What is something you can do today to start finding a solution?