Creating your own challenges

I was talking to a good friend of mine in India and we had this conversation about seeking comfort in life vs pushing yourself towards challenging situations…not troublesome but challenging. Situations and roles that demand more of you than you can initially muster, making you grow and stretch.

So the thought that kinda struck me is that we are responsible for laying our challenges in life…challenges that make us grow in ways we want. If we don’t we will end up following others’ plans for us ….which is not much. And regardless if we don’t seek our own challenges and then try to grow into them, we eventually get hit by challenges that life throws at us and we are unable to cope up because we  never put the effort into growing and be able to cope up effectively.

If someone invests poorly in education in their life and doesn’t push himself to be really good in their field of choice, you get hit by challenges posed by a difficult career, lack of opportunity and general lack of incompetency in whatever you get assigned. It just compounds. That is a unwanted challenge for sure. The other option is to challenge yourself in advance to be really good in directions you want and then you don’t get into messy challenges in the first place. The choice lies with us. And it comes down to: “You have to create your own challenges. Take the time to lay them out and work on them”