Space L Clottey

The Purpose of Extreme Challenges

We’re Mortys! We’re not defined by our relationships to Rick! Our lives, are our own!

You are often incorrect about the things which you consider absolute limits, but you can only discover this by actually trying to surpass the limit even when it feels impossible.

Most people only do this once a year or so on a special occasion, meaning you only get seventy to eighty of these in a lifetime.

Every change isn’t an improvement, but every improvement is necessarily a change.

Reality is reality no matter what you believe.. If you’re scared of something or see it as a limit when it really won’t harm you or really isn’t impossible and you discover that in a year rather than next week, you would’ve lost that time and could’ve been that much stronger that much sooner and there would’ve been nothing stopping you.

Extreme challenges are for levelling up as quickly as we can.

Extreme challenges are for limits, and limits are recognised through fears. You should use your challenges for things that are scary or feel impossible. If it’s scary or feels impossible, you’re picking something good enough.

Extreme challenges are not for things which you’ve already tried, or that are no longer scary, or that you just wanna try and see how it goes. Those are boring, go use another framework. Calling them “extreme” is dishonest, don’t lie to me, don’t lie

If you know you’re not going to do it up front, go and fail somewhere else.

Extreme challenges are for breaking in the very edges of our character and erasing our fears and becoming someone new, someone stronger each week.

We’re [humans]! We’re not defined by our relationships to [fear]! Our lives, are our own!

But not perfectionism

BUT what you DON’T want to do is get super caught up in trying to make an impossible challenge each week, so:

If you can’t think of something extreme, think of something new.

For example, last week I was thinking it’d be neat to walk for an hour each morning. I knew it wasn’t impossible, I didn’t think there was any chance I could fail, and yet it’s something new and far beyond anything I’ve already done.

And it’s been going great, and I’ve been learning a lot!

What you don’t want to do is to regress. Is to try things below the things you’ve already tried and done, or to do the same thing again. You’re not gonna learn nearly as much from that compared to trying something you’ve never done before.

Open Problems

How to ensure you do the challenge, and what if it’s really impossible?

Extreme inspiration:

- https://www.raptitude.com/2015/12/7-years-experiments/

So if much of life’s failure consists in holding yourself to too low a standard, you should be wary of demanding too little from yourself—setting goals that are too easy to fulfill.

~ Trying to Try, Eliezer yudkowsky


Space L Clottey