Have I Challenged Myself?
What events in your life are more challenging?
The ones that involve more physical effort
or the mental ones. I think the physical ones are easier to measure since you
can only run so fast or lift a weight a certain amount of time before your body
shuts down. You may want to do more;
however the muscles won’t respond.
The mental challenges don’t have the same
physiological metric, the closest analogy maybe when you are working on some
tasks and you fall sleep right on the desk.
Even your mind has a limit to the time you can consciously use it. For me I can identify sometimes when I hit my
physical limit, however I can’t remember when I tested my mental capacity to
the limits.
All I can think of is a picture of a software
coder pulling an all-nighter to grind out the code. Bill Gates had the
concentration ability to work 48 hours straight then lay down by the desk to
get a little sleep and then get back to marathon coding.
I guess a lot of people who are really
passionate about the work they are doing get lost in it and lose all track of
time, sometimes for very long periods.
I have not found a job I am passionate about
that I have worked extremely long hours on. I have read books that have absorbed
a lot of time. I’ve had that “can’t put
it down” feeling and go on and on. This is especially true on weekends when I
did not have to go to work. Reading is
not working the mind in the way as say solving calculus problems.
I’ve had times when I had to have deep focus and
concentration. Landing a plane on an
aircraft carrier during the night did get my attention. However, that was for a limited time. There benefits of deep concentration, for say
one to one and a half hours and then take a break. If someone did two of these periods in a day they
can get a tremendous amount of work done.
Those three hours produce more than in a regular day due to the
elimination of distractions. Also, this
routine can go on day after day, there is not bad effects.
Now, I just have to find that activity that really
challenges me and that I really want to do.
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