If Life was a video game, how would you set the difficulty level? Assuming you can only select one, I’d say Medium is just right. The key to growth is difficulty… but not too much of it.
Medium difficulty allows you to challenge yourself without over-challenging yourself, sort of like spice levels at a Thai restaurant. You can tolerate Extra Spicy, but what’s the point if you can no longer enjoy or taste any of the food you’re having?
Furthermore, setting a Medium difficulty level allows you to balance challenge and fun, which then keeps you going in the long run, fueling incremental growth. Imagine if the only dumbbell available at the gym was 100 pounds. No one would use it because it’s too much for virtually any exercise. It’s too challenging. Now, imagine that the only dumbbell available was 1 pound. No one would use it because it’s too light and useless. It would be too boring. This likely explains why the 20 and 25 pound dumbbells are almost always occupied at the gym. Being in the middle makes it challenging but not overly challenging. And once you build the muscle, you then move onto the next weight range of 30 to 35 and so on, redefining what is now your new “Medium difficulty.”
The Key to Growth Is Difficulty
Applying this principle to anything you do will allow you to have fun while continuously advancing your abilities. As we improve in anything, we also tend to like it more because of the new possibilities that become available.
Take tennis, for example, a sport that many people give up on almost immediately. The moment they hit a ball out of the courts is the moment most give up. What they don’t understand is that they were doomed from the beginning because they set the difficulty level too high. Most first timers are given a racket without any proper instruction. Not knowing how to hold a racket, position oneself on the court, and swing is a recipe for disaster.
Rather, what a newcomer to tennis should do is set the difficulty to Medium. Medium for a newcomer is to learn how to hold a racket, stand 5 feet from the net – not 40 feet – and push the ball to the other side – no swings. That’s a lot already for someone who has never held a racket, but in my time teaching others how to play, this is the sweet spot. They get the ball over and build confidence in themselves, and once they get the hang of it, they take a step back, and back again, and again until they find themselves 30 and then 40 feet away, no longer afraid of hitting home runs.
Finding your Medium difficulty is crucial to helping you grow. It allows you to build self-confidence from incremental wins, and it’s a concept that can be applied to everything, from sports to school. The best part is the fun never ends, because there’s always something more to learn and overcome, a new Medium.
A Dating Decision Gone Wrong: The Time When I (Unknowingly) Set My Difficulty Level Too High
“Hey Jess, would you like to go play tennis some time?”
My famous last words. I had just started my junior year in college, and Jessica and I happened to share a few classes together. We were business majors at UC Berkeley, and from what I gathered, I heard Jessica was pretty good, even labeled “semi-pro” by some of my other peers.
She was a USTA rated 5.0 player. I had no idea what that meant, but I figured I’d be okay. After all, I had played for years with my friends; granted, we weren’t competitive and didn’t really know what we were doing, but we managed to get the balls over the net. If anything, I told myself, I could always just slice the back if all else failed.
Well, it turns out that all else did fail. And the slice, too. That failed miserably. If life was a video game, I had just gone to the final level boss battle as a Level 1 noob. Difficulty: Insanity. It was so bad that I couldn’t even get a single ball back to Jessica. Ball after ball, I dumped them into the net or worse, often into the cold concrete in front of me. Needless to say, the date didn’t go well, and I practically quit tennis for a long time.
The Key to Growth: Difficulty (But Not Too Much of It)
It wasn’t until about 5 years after graduating that I properly learned how to hit a ball. I learned that everything I did in the past was all wrong: my technique, my positioning, and certainly my slice. Humbled, I decided to hit a hard reset button and start all over.
I relearned how to play from scratch. I practiced the way I saw young children playing, playing “short court” before gradually moving back a few feet at a time. Everything was challenging but just at the right level of “challenging”. In other words, I found my Medium difficulty, and I’ve gotten better and better ever since.
Today, I’ve since taught many others how to play the sport. Like them, I felt hopeless while flailing for a tennis ball, but unlike me, they likely will never ask someone out on a first date while doing it.
State of Flow
-Dan
Need help finding the right amount of challenge to keep you growing? Our mentors at ReadyEdgeGo specialize in making customized recommendations that fit each student’s individual needs.
