Are You Really Challenging Yourself?
This is a bit of a Dear Diary post, but hopefully we’ll get some sort of learning lesson from it.
So recently I decided to do a thirty day email challenge. If you’re not on the list, then you can still get the second half of the challenge, and you probably want to and I’ll tell you why.
A lot of people who run these challenges think, “sure, no problem. Thirty emails, thirty days.”
Then they write a few emails that basically amount to, “Hey… Couldn’t think of anything to write today but does anyone want to be a success? Do something every day like I’m doing and then you’ll be a success! Little Steps!”
I haven’t done that.
In fact, this week, I bought a few new domains to work on projects with.
Getting these projects up and running and running an email challenge and writing the blog posts is pretty tough.
But with the emails – I’ve talked step-by-step about how to set up a niche site, how to set up and ecommerce store and today’s email was about setting up a site for an online course.
All of these emails have been 1,000 words or so.
Then I’ve written the daily blog posts.
And I’m planning, writing and sourcing products for the above stuff.
This is all pretty ridiculous in terms of workload and it seems pretty insurmountable at the moment.
But that’s good, and here’s why.
Mental Work Is Like Physical Work: You Need To Go Overcapacity To Gain Any Benefit
I’ve written about overlearning before. Essentially, if you learn, memorise and work your brain past its exhaustion point, you expand your capacity and you retain what you’ve learned better.
When you say to yourself something like, “I’m going to create two new niche sites, one e-commerce store and set up an online course in four days and I’m going to chronicle the process to send it out as email while doing all my other work on top of that…”
You’re making sure your brain is pushing harder.
Today, I feel as though I’ve been working out hard. When you do a workout and your muscles feel like they’re going to pop out of your skin, you essentially know that you’ve done something good and they’ll grow back stronger.
If you do this with your brain, it will work in much the same way, despite what some people said about my Raise Your IQ post.
When it comes to work related stuff the same is true. I have created a ton of websites by now, but the past few days I’ve been in and out of CPanel accounts, setting up SSL certificates, rejigging site designs and creating images.
I’m a lot better, and you will be too. Push yourself.
Final Thoughts
Unlike your muscles, it’s unlikely you’ll give yourself a serious brain injury by working too hard.
If you continuously do it over and over again or you spend too long at a computer/staring at a screen, then you will obviously suffer adverse effects.
However, aside from that there’s nothing wrong with pushing your skills to their limit. In fact, that’s how you progress.
Speaking of reaching a limit, I’m done for the night.
See you in the next one.