Beware of Challenge Stacking
Let’s take a look at your schedule this year. We could start with your New Year’s resolution, or your to do list. We could start with your anxieties or your dreams. Regardless, there is a common thread in many of our lives.
You know what it is already. These things haven’t happened.
Why does this happen? Why!!!???
Everything is hard. Something about the economy, stupid.
So let’s get the semantics out of the way. For the purposes of this article (and occasionally my life), I say challenge and difficulty are not acceptable synonyms. Challenge is something you can rise to. YOU, specifically, CAN. I’m not asking if you can, I am making a statement. Difficulty is a spectrum. At a certain point, things are not yet impossible, but certainly are not feasible. Some of us believed when people told us about feasibility, they told us to be realistic about art or music or whatever else our dream may have been. Well, I grew up at exactly the time where that advice was wrong, but the underlying concept was the same thing I was saying about difficulty. Some things are simply too hard to accomplish without way too much effort. When collapse, failure, or disaster are imminent, we can call that the breakdown threshold.
