You know, the challenge in front of you. The one you are facing (unavoidably) or considering. The one that is difficult, kind of inspiring, but intimidating, too. Here’s why you should go for it.

And yet, only challenge causes growth. Only challenge will test our skills and make us better. Only challenge and the self-motivation to engage the challenge will transform us. Every challenge we face is an opportunity to create a more skillful self. So it is up to you to constantly look for challenges to motivate yourself with. And it’s up to you to notice when you’re buried alive in a comfort zone. – Steve Chandler

1. Challenges keep your life from becoming an exercise in boredom.

How exciting is it to do the same (normal) thing every day, to walk the same (comfortable) rut every week? Oooh. Goose bumps. Can hardly contain the excitement. Hold your enthusiasm. Wow, it’s those mundane things that really bring the zest into your life, isn’t it? Um, wait. Maybe not. Shake yourself up. Do something new.

Don’t be boring until you’re dead, and before you die make sure you try all sorts of wacky, impossible things that will give people plenty to talk about at your funeral.

Consider it your gift to a world full of boring people.

2. Challenges help you to grow.

As our friend Mr. Chandler pointed out above, “only challenge causes growth.” And have you heard that other one about when you cease to grow, you begin to die?

3. Challenges show you what you’re capable of.

Struggling with confidence? Burdened by a string of failures in your (recent) past? Not sure what you can do, or even why you would try? The longer you sit around with your self-defeating, fatalistic thoughts, the more you become a pseudo-emo-child and world knows we don’t need any more of those.

Get off your emofied bum and go do something challenging.

4. Challenges help you let go of the old dead stuff you didn’t even realize you were carrying around.

S’true. You have baggage. It might be in terms of old dead habits (they are no longer serving you) or old dead relationships (they are not longer vital, viable, or sustainable) or old dead ways of thinking… or just in terms of physical stuff (clutter = old dead stuff stinking up your space). When you commit to and begin pursuing a new challenge, you start reaching forward.

You put a new priority on the new habits and new relationships and new ways of thinking required to achieve the challenge. As a result, you begin, often unconsciously, letting that old stuff fall away.

And it’s good. You feel lighter, you feel better, and you realize that you didn’t need all that old dead ick infringing on your life.

5. Challenges motivate and inspire other people around you.

Want to help a friend who’s stuck? Do something challenging and share the challenge. DON’T tell her to take on a challenge. Take on one yourself, and let her see your struggle and your success. We all need to move out of the small window of our own view and see a bigger world. You take on a challenge, you expand your own view, and you let the people around you share that. It’s good for everybody.

6. Challenges give you a chance to get closer to who you actually want to be.

Even challenges which seem directly unrelated to your long-term goals or life plan or what-have-you still bring you closer to reaching those goals, to becoming that person you (secretly?) want to be. Why? Because challenges help you grow, help you see how capable you are, help you let go of old dead stuff… hey, have you been reading this list?

7. Challenges give you something worthwhile to talk about.

Grace us with interesting Facebook status updates. Please. In the age of endless, constant communication, we’re all dying for something interesting to hear and discuss. Something besides the latest Youtube video or how much people hate Mondays or what we all had for lunch. Verbal refreshment, in the form of challenge updates. Bring it. We’re waiting.

8. Challenges call out the better part of who you are.

You know what part of you is resisting the challenge before you now? The fearful part. The lazy part. The hesitant, indecisive, self-indulgent, self-conscious part. In other words: not the good part. Don’t give the weenie-half any more power than it wields (for a wimpy part-of-self, it’s a power monger; don’t feed that).

Bring forth the best.

9. Challenges give you more sympathy for others who are struggling.

It’s easy to be deconstructively critical and snarky and all-things-culturally-acceptable-but-rude when we feel comfortable in our own lives. It’s easy to look down on others when we feel we have the high ground in our own lives.

But when you yourself are staring at a mountain, when the climb is sapping your energy, when you’re putting your all into something that’s tough but rewarding, then you can see a little more clearly.

You can sympathize with the struggles – and the successes – of other people in your life. Your high horse isn’t so high, after all, when you get it in perspective. Get that perspective for yourself or life will hand it to you, painfully, one way or the other.

10. Challenges equip you to be more useful and helpful to others.

At the end of any challenge, even a challenge which you might technically fail but still put all your heart and soul’s effort into, you will be a better, smarter, more knowledgeable, more helpful, more empathetic, and vastly more interesting person. Which means you have more to offer to other people, to the people closest to you, to the world in general. This is a good thing. Good for your self-esteem, good for your social life. Also, good for humanity.

So go for it.

Image: Me on top of a mountain by Blogging Bookshelf

The world is full of too many possibilities. We can never grasp them all. We are inadequate for everything but able still to conquer more than we think. We must let go of paralysis, fear, anxiety, self-consciousness.

We get distracted. We blind ourselves staring into the sun, but the sun isn’t our aim. The world is full of obstacles and we spend too much time avoiding them. Challenges make us alive. Comfort, too much of it, deadens our senses. We need the zest, the thrill, the hurt of sweat dripping off our noses and muscles tight from exertion. We need the pain of a hard chair and tiredness of a night staying up too late writing another page, and then another, and then another, and then another.

We need hard work, because we shun hard work as a culture. Our goals are to ease the pain of work, and in so focusing on the part that is painful we lose sight of the sheer pleasure of exertion toward an admirable goal.

Work is brilliant. Work is beautiful. Work is our life. Healthy, rightful play is work. We have, most of us, even forgotten how to play well. Instead we seek to be amused, which is not active involvement but passive reception.

We listen to music rather than make it. We pretend our exploits via video games rather than attempt them. We watch others live and laugh and hurt and love and conquer and die on the movie screen rather than walk outside and take the risk ourselves. We detach ourselves from life by engaging ourselves in non-life, in imitations of life: ear phones, cell phones, computer screens, chat rooms, social pages, news feeds, blog posts, newspapers, radio, streaming music, youtube videos, texting, messaging, uploading, downloading, saving, reformatting, watching not a bird or a real person but an actor, listening not to the wind or the waves or the sound of a voice next to us, something real, but to a recording of something real.

None of these things are bad, but it is bad that they have become all that we are. We define ourselves on-line rather than in life. We spend more time thinking of a cute status update or a great tag line on our blog than we do thinking of a sister’s birthday gift or a conversation with a friend. We are so busy recording life into pixelated pieces that we are neglecting to live it.

The trouble isn’t technology, it is human laziness and apathy and the ease with which we roll into the rut beside us. This problem was around long before the computers lit up, and it will continue to be around long after the next fifteen thousand technologies come and go. We can lose ourselves in anything that amuses, entertains, swallows us up without providing any value.

We call it leisure but it is not; it does not refresh or rejuvenate us, it drains us of energy and leaves us blinking and yawning. It is the feeling of stepping out of the movie theater into the bright afternoon sun, surprised to find that a whole world has been happening while we were lost in another. One is real, one is not. There is nothing wrong with make-believe. We need pretend, fantasy, and ways to escape. But we need a life to escape from, not just a series of trap doors leading from one escape route to another. This is why entertainment fails to entertain us: we have too much of it. We have no contrast. Everything is technicolor.

The cost is life. We fill up our space with too many little things and then we are too busy running around trying to keep them all connected, putting them in place, keeping up with them, taking advantage of our advantages. We end up worn out by our own luxuries. A lot less of everything is what we need.

Less food to choose from might help us to enjoy our daily bread without wishing we had gone to the other restaurant instead.

It’s easy to get focused on the wrong things. The world is fighting for your focus, and if you forget you are in a battle, it will be easy to get distracted. If you allow the world to grab and hold your attention, then you’ll spend hours listening to and thinking about the world’s messages – instead of God’s – and as a result, you won’t be able to do what you really want and need to do ( How to Be Your Best When You Feel Your Worst, Casey Treat, pp 34-35).

The ache we feel in our chests, the dissatisfaction with where we are and what we have, the urge that sends us to the mall, to the Internet, to the television or the club or the movie or the concert is not for something more to see or hear or buy or experience. The ache is to do, to produce, to be valuable.

Some of us are realizing that, and we see the results in all sorts of wonderful ways: backyard gardens, home made loaves of bread and preserved fruit, carefully crafted quilts, reinvented vintage clothes, entire marketplaces of hand made offerings from jewelry to toys to furniture to art.

Some of us are still caught in a culture that has yet to slow down enough to acknowledge the ache for what it is. Don’t let yourself be one of those. Don’t let the quick urgent pull of purchasing blind you to the deeper satisfaction of being a producer more than you are a consumer. Add more value to the world than you take away. Get comfortable with being uncomfortable (as you will be if you resist the culture even a small bit) and you will find your life rising up within you, carrying you further than you knew you could go. That’s living.