Unlocking Your Potential: How Challenge Redefines Your Abilities

I found this, this graph or this chart. I spend way too much time on Pinterest and I find all kinds of, I don't know, I save it into a psychology board and it's super cool to me. But, you know, now I've started talking about it because I think it's really cool. I love to share it. But it's a, it's a diagram that has on the, the y-axis, I guess if you will, challenge starting at low to high, and on the The x-axis, it's got ability, low to high. So it's basically a graph of your challenge versus your ability. And inside there are different sectors, if you will, starting off with low ability, low challenge, it's apathy. Then to the right it's boredom, then relaxation. Above that is control, and then above apathy you have worry, anxiety, arousal, and flow. Flow being in green, which is like, I guess, where you want to be. Ideally. Um, but I thought it was interesting that you move from apathy to high— higher challenge from apathy is worry, higher challenge from worry is anxiety. And, uh, to the other direction, from apathy, higher ability with no challenge increase becomes boredom. Uh, higher ability with no challenge increase from that becomes relaxation, or something you were initially bored about, now it's relaxing. And then as you start increasing those, you move into worry, right? That's more challenge without increasing your ability, right? So it's getting harder without you getting smarter or you having higher abilities to complete whatever it is you're trying to do. That becomes worry and then leads into anxiety. And then as you increase your ability from anxiety to— with, uh, with anxiety, so that's a high challenge but now you're increasing your abilities, you're moving into arousal and then into flow. The opposite direction, you're from relaxation, you increase the challenge, you move into control. So now you have the, you know, controlled relaxation. You have a high ability, the challenge is increasing, and you're moving into flow. So to me, this is like a level of productivity that you want to, you want to achieve. There needs to be a good balance of your abilities versus your challenge. Too much challenge, it becomes a problem. Too high of abilities and not enough challenge becomes a problem, right? It's boring. So trying to find the right— and as a manager, this is very important to me because I want to make sure that I'm putting the right work with the right level of skill. And then you have to think about scaling. So how can someone increase their abilities? And how can we also increase the challenge to match their ability growth? And these are— this is really important because it helps retain, retain employees. It helps keep people interested doing things they love, obviously growing their abilities and getting smarter and just progressing. So it's just something I saw overall. I got to find a way to share the, the diagram, but I just wanted to talk about it a little bit and, you know, just kind of share my thoughts about it overall and how it kind of pertains to management and growth and things like that. So till then, see you later.