{"id":12235,"date":"2017-08-15T10:00:52","date_gmt":"2017-08-15T08:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hatrabbits.com\/?p=12235\/"},"modified":"2023-11-21T11:55:42","modified_gmt":"2023-11-21T10:55:42","slug":"make-your-challenge-more-challenging","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hatrabbits.com\/en\/make-your-challenge-more-challenging\/","title":{"rendered":"Why you should make your challenge more challenging"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Sometimes a problem can seem impossibly hard to solve. Oddly enough, in those cases<\/em><em> the best approach might be to make your challenge even harder\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n<p>In a <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/hatrabbits.com\/en\/when-solving-a-problem-be-lazy\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">previous post<\/a><\/span>, I wrote about being creatively lazy and making your challenge unreasonably easy. Today I\u2019d like to share a technique that is pretty much the exact opposite: making your challenge unnecessarily difficult.<\/p>\n<h4><strong>The benefits of making your challenge more challenging<\/strong><\/h4>\n<p>When you have trouble finding a solution to your problem, your challenge might not be inspiring enough. While it seems counterintuitive, making your challenge more challenging might just be the jolt your creativity needs.<\/p>\n<p>A boring challenge is paralysing. A \u2018<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/hatrabbits.com\/en\/vision-focus-babysteps\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">moonshot goal<\/a><\/span>\u2019 is much more inspiring and will be fun to pursue.<\/p>\n<p>Making your situation more challenging has several benefits:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em>You\u2019ll start <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/hatrabbits.com\/en\/perspective\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">looking at your situation differently<\/a><\/span><\/em>. Usual approaches will not be good enough to resolve the more ambitious challenge. You\u2019ll need to look for something special.<\/li>\n<li><em><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/hatrabbits.com\/en\/setbacks-blessings-in-disguise\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Setbacks<\/a><\/span>\u00a0and limitations make people resourceful.<\/em>\u00a0Even when the limitations are artificial, you\u2019ll automatically start thinking about more outlandish approaches than you would normally consider.<\/li>\n<li><em>Unreasonable challenges spark unusual solutions<\/em>. Luckily even the most <a href=\"https:\/\/hatrabbits.com\/en\/wishful-thinking\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">preposterous ideas<\/span><\/a> can be made workable. After all, it\u2019s much easier to tame a wild idea than it is to make a boring idea interesting.<\/li>\n<li><em>After trying to solve a much harder challenge, dealing with your initial problem will be a piece of cake<\/em>. The solution to your unreasonable challenge might not be perfect (as desperate situations call for desperate measures), but you&#8217;ll have plenty of room to refine the approach. In the end, your actual problem is not as depressing as the one you tried to solve and a less radical approach will do.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>There are several ways to quickly increase the difficulty level of your challenge:<\/p>\n<h4><strong>Think big<\/strong><\/h4>\n<p>Rephrase your target and make it (much) more ambitious. Say you want to increase revenue by 10%. What if you started thinking about ways to increase revenue by 300%? You\u2019ll automatically start thinking about much more audacious approaches. You might still not reach your ridiculously big goal, but would you consider a &#8216;flimsy&#8217; 50% increase a failure? Of course not, you&#8217;d greatly exceed your initial goal. Making your radical approach a bit more realistic might bring the number down a bit, but even ending with a 10% increase will be a win (as this was your goal all along).<\/p>\n<h4><strong>Dramatise<\/strong><\/h4>\n<p>What if you\u2019d imagine the situation to be <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/hatrabbits.com\/en\/make-it-worse\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">much worse<\/a><\/span> than it actually is? What, for instance, if not only the sales of last quarter are disappointing, but all your customers suddenly leave you for an exciting new brand? What would you do to get them back? Thinking about dealing with your worst nightmare might lead to surprising insights and will force you to be resourceful in coming up with solutions.<\/p>\n<h4><strong>Limit yourself<\/strong><\/h4>\n<p>What if you make it hard for yourself by adding limitations? What if you would have a tiny (or no) budget? What if you\u2019d have to implement the solution within the next two hours? What if you had to\u00a0solve the challenge without changing anything to the space\u00a0in which the situation occurs? You\u2019d be forced to disregard the obvious approaches. You\u2019d have to come up with unusual alternatives. Artificially limiting your options creates a necessity for more surprising approaches.<\/p>\n<p>Some factors you could (artificially) limit are budget, people, time, space, volume, colour, shape and equipment.<\/p>\n<h4><\/h4>\n<h4><strong>In Summary:<\/strong><\/h4>\n<p>To force yourself to be more resourceful, make your challenge more challenging. Rephrase your goal to make it more ambitious, ask yourself what you would do if the situation was much more dramatic (and thus more urgent) or limit your options severely.<\/p>\n<p><em>How will you make your challenge more challenging?<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sometimes a problem can seem impossibly hard to solve. Oddly enough, in those cases the best approach might be to make your challenge even harder\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12245,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"mc4wp_mailchimp_campaign":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[315,1],"tags":[631,1039,1040],"class_list":["post-12235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-problem-solving","category-thinking-techniques","tag-challenge","tag-challenging","tag-make-it-harder"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.0 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Why you should make your challenge more challenging - HatRabbits<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Sometimes a problem can seem impossibly hard to solve. 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