At any given time of your life you face challenges
Challenge, of course, is only a challenge if it challenges you
For some breathing is a challenge
For others conquering the world is a challenge
And for some breathing is not a challenge
And for some conquering the world is NOT a challenge
Challenge is only real if it challenges you
At any given time of your life you face challenges
Those challenges you conquer — or you don’t
Every challenge you conquered makes you stronger
Some challenges you failed also make you stronger
Some challenges you failed weaken you
Furthermore
Every challenge you conquered makes you more confident
And most challenges you failed make you less confident
Your confidence level informs the future challenges you’ll take
The lower your confidence, the lesser challenges you’ll choose
If it’s very low — you may seek not to challenge yourself at all
And when you don’t challenge yourself — you become even weaker
And when you become weaker — you become even more poorly equipped to face challenges
Thus when they come — you fail them
And become even less confident
It’s a vicious circle
Conversely,
When your confidence is strong — you take on greater challenges
This accelerates your acquisition of power, acquisition of strength,
The greater the challenge you overcame — the more strength you acquire
Unless you get overconfident
Which is when you take challenge too great for yourself
You hurt yourself
You become weaker
And your ego gets cut in half, and of course your confidence
To this formula, let’s add all the opacity of the world, all the uncertainty
You don’t really truly know HOW powerful you are
You don’t really truly know a challenge BEFORE you have finally faced it
This makes the entire process quite random, erratic
Add to that the extreme element of fortune — and it gets EVEN MORE CHAOTIC
One can get lucky for a really long time
One can get lucky for a really long time,
or unlucky
Too much luck and overconfidence is guaranteed. Entitlement is guaranteed. Delusion is guaranteed. Narcissism is guaranteed.
Too little luck and hopelessness is all but certain. Insecurity is all but certain.
Lastly however,
Once you fought long enough
(Long enough doesn’t necessarily imply time),
once you had seen the vicissitudes
You begin to observe one element which is unchanging in all of that
It is you
Or not even you, as you too “change”, don’t you
It’s your ATTITUDE
It’s your intention
Your energy
Your determination
Your enthusiasm
Your will
This is true strength, which is unrelated to the outside world
And this is true, “core” confidence, which again is unrelated, unaffected by the outside world
OUTSIDE world is but the stone on which it is sharpened
But as you kept getting stronger on the outside, overcoming more and more challenges — you develop a certain deeper kind of strength, a strength which goes before all other strength and power
Your character
And as you kept getting more and more confident with anything specific — only to see yourself get humbled by something, dragged back to earth and crashing — you begin to tap into a deeper and deeper kind of confidence
Your fundamental, untouchable dignity
But you can’t fake it
And that’s the great irony
The outer overcoming is not the point. It’s simply what you do, what you must do, what life is
But it’s the blossoming of you, as an individual, which is the point
But this only happens THROUGH the challenges of the outer world
Because anything but that is but an invitation for intoxication, delusion,
There must be this grounding in reality
Only reality can be the rock on which you sharpen