Maxim #1: How hard could it be?

This is the first of a continuing series of maxims, listed in no particular order.

This is what I ask myself whenever I am facing a decision, where the difficulty of one of the choices is a factor.  The idea is not to let your perceived difficulty of something have too much sway in your decision.  If it’s something that you are considering doing, it’s something you are capable of doing.  This generally applies to a decision to take on a large or unfamiliar project or task

Too often do people make excuses to set themselves up for failure before they even begin.  “I don’t have the time,” “I’m not smart enough,” “It’s too hard,” and my favorite “what if I fail.”  If you choose to pass on something, make sure you are passing on it for the right reasons, and not because it would require uncomfortable personal sacrifice.  Personal sacrifice puts us out of our comfort zone, and causes us to grow as people, internalizing our experience.  The same goes for failure (more on that later), which isn't to say failure should even be an outcome that you are resigned to accept.

Example

When I was considering going back to school in my mid 20’s to finish up a degree in engineering, I was working a 50 hour a week job, living on my own without the comfort of a safety net, and was a good bit removed from a lot of my earlier college experience.  I knew I was jumping into a very serious program that required me to put forward a great deal of time and effort, with a real financial penalty for failure.  I mulled over the decision weighing the pros and cons for a few weeks, but I was ultimately hung up on the unparalleled personal effort I would need to put into it. 

That’s the point where I stopped and thought “How hard could it be?”  A good deal of the nature of the question is in the phrasing, it puts it into a perspective and seems to shrink the obstacle before you.  I thought back over all the things I had accomplished in my life and kinda chuckled to myself and thought that in comparison, this can’t be all that difficult.  Surely the person I am can overcome this challenge.  And by overcoming a big challenge, you equip yourself to overcome bigger challenges—a concept which seems daunting at first, but has an amazing size effect.  Once you overcome bigger and bigger challenges, the smaller ones in your everyday life become easier and easier.  When you have it in the back of your mind that you faced a great fear of yours and delivered a speech to a room of 300 people, dealing with some asshole who runs a red light and hits you doesn’t seem to fry your nerves as much as it would have in the past.