PROBLEM OR OPPORTUNITY?77 years ago today, the world’s second deployed atomic bomb was detonated over the Japanese city of Nagasaki, three short days after the first one wiped out ninety percent of Hiroshima. These twin bombings are the only acknowledged use of nuclear weapons in armed conflict. (The uranium for the nuclear bombs dropped on these cities in Japan came from a mine in south-east Congo.)With a death toll of over 200,000 people, Japan was brought to its knees, waving the white flag and signing whatever the allied troops brought to the table. Those two days of infamy effectively brought the second world war to a conclusive end. Until then, the indomitable Japanese had not lost a war in 2600 years.A year earlier, American B-29 superfortress bombers had dropped 350,000 kilograms of bombs filled with gasoline and flammable jelly on Tokyo, one of the world’s oldest cities. Tokyo (then) was mostly made of wood so the bombs set off a hurricane of fire, instantly burning alive 300,000 people, 4 times the number who died in Hiroshima. More than a million people were gruesomely injured and 80 percent of the city’s buildings were vaporized.ENTER ENTREPRENEURSHIP. A short ten months later, while billows of white smoke were still rising over the ashes, Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka co-founded Sony. Their core value was the elevation of Japanese culture and national status. Nice and dandy (and cute) for a start-up to say, right? Well, what to say now. Sony is synonymous with Japan. “WHAT IS THE OPPORTUNITY HERE?”Every entrepreneur has variants of this question wired into their DNA. We see opportunity even in calamity. It’s Phil Knight flying into a still-burning Tokyo shortly after the end of the war to place his first big order of what we all now wear to run, and for leisure and even work – Nike shoes. Ditto what Jeff Bezos of Amazon was doing last year while we hid behind our front doors.Entrepreneurs are a strange breed. Even in the midst of a blitzkrieg, legal battles, near bankruptcy (and what have you), they see possibilities. When everyone is crying foul and lamenting how bad the economy is, and how inflation is ticking, their focus is set, like flint, not on what is going wrong, but on the opportunities hidden in the pain and present darkness.Callous, hawk-eyed and cold-blooded speculators? May be. But the question remains: What do you see – PROBLEM or OPPORTUNITY?