Quotes About Challenge

decade: "The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile." Csikszentmihalyi calls this mental state flow (a term he popularized with a 1990 book of the same title).

continuous and harsh feedback he received accelerated the growth of his ability.

In hindsight, these observations are obvious. If life-transforming missions could be found with just a little navel-gazing and an optimistic attitude, changing the world would be commonplace. But it's not commonplace; it's instead quite rare. This rareness, we now understand, is because these breakthroughs require that you first get to the cutting edge, and this is hard—the type of hardness that most of us try to avoid in our working lives. The

decade: "The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.

Deliberate practice is often the opposite of enjoyable. I like the term "stretch" for describing what deliberate practice feels like,

None of these students was interested in achieving solely for achieving's sake; rather, they had a natural hunger for intellectual challenge and a flair for transforming their personal interests into exciting projects

You're instead waging a David and Goliath battle against institutions that are both impossibly rich and intent on using this wealth to stop you from winning.

Pushing past what is comfortable, however is only one part of the deliberate-practice story; the other part is embracing honest feedback — even if it destroys what you thought was good.

The point of providing these details is to emphasize that intelligent machines are complicated and hard to master.* To join the group of those who can work well with these machines, therefore, requires that you hone your ability to master hard things. And because these technologies change rapidly, this process of mastering hard things never ends: You must be able to do it quickly, again and again.

given week, the higher the subject's life satisfaction. Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging. There

this thirty-day experiment

players sounds similar to Jordan Tice's approach to music: They're both focused on difficult activities, carefully chosen to stretch your abilities where they most need stretching and that provide immediate feedback.

I follow a rule with my life that if something is scary, do it. I've lived everywhere in America, and for me, a big scary thing was living outside the country." After

method for building skills by ruthlessly stretching yourself beyond where you're comfortable.

Irónicamente, es más fácil disfrutar el trabajo que el tiempo libre, porque —como ocurre en las actividades donde hay estado de flujo— el trabajo implica metas, reglas y retos. Todo ello contribuye a que uno se involucre en el trabajo, se concentre en él y se deje llevar. El tiempo libre, en cambio, es desestructurado y se requiere un mayor esfuerzo para darle una forma que nos produzca satisfacción.18

The real rewards are reserved not for those who are comfortable using Facebook (a shallow task, easily replicated), but instead for those who are comfortable building the innovative distributed systems that run the service (a decidedly deep task, hard to replicate).

My suggestion is that you try to learn and apply one new skill every week, over a period of six weeks. Start with easy projects like those suggested above, but as soon as you feel the challenge wane, ramp up the complication of the skills and steps involved.

just because you really want to organize your work around a mission doesn't mean that you can easily make it happen.

be sure to also give yourself a specific time frame to keep the session a discrete challenge and not an open-ended slog.

focused on difficult activities, carefully chosen to stretch your abilities where they most need stretching and that provide immediate feedback.

taking on projects that were beyond his current comfort zone;

Strain, I now accepted, was good. Instead of seeing this discomfort as a sensation to avoid, I began to understand it the same way that a body builder understands muscle burn: a sign that you're doing something right. Inspired by this insight, I accompanied a promise to do more large-scale paper deconstructions of this type with a trio of smaller habits designed to inject even more deliberate practice into my daily routine. I describe these new routines below: My

The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile." Csikszentmihalyi calls this mental state flow

It's safer to comment on our culture than to step into the Rooseveltian ring and attempt to wrestle it into something better.