Danger and Opportunity

John F. Kennedy was once quoted with saying "When written in Chinese, the word 'crisis' is composed of two characters - one represents danger, and the other represents opportunity." I don't know much about the Chinese language, in fact I hardly know anything at all. So, I took a little time to look into it a little more and found something interesting. I discovered that even though you might try to make this inspiring and convince yourself that a crisis is a good thing because there is opportunity to be had, you need to keep looking just a little further.

"Crisis" is in fact made up of the two words that are literally, danger (wei) + opportunity (ji). However, here is what I found that was interesting. The word above is still "crisis" in Chinese. There is nothing good about a crisis. Even though symbolically, there may be opportunity in the face of danger, it is still a crisis. If you want to make Kennedy's quote a little more applicable, you need to understand that the Chinese have another word. If in fact you want to turn a crisis into an opportunity you must go from "wei ji" to "zhuan ji". Zhuan (turn into) and ji (opportunity) literally means "turn into opportunity". That is how an opportunity can arise out of a crisis. It requires a little change.

Take a look at the Chinese symbols here. You can also read more about how these Chinese characters have been taken away from their meaning here.