The story of your life is, well, a story. How interesting would that story be if its protagonist, you, had no challenge to overcome? Would it be a story you would want to tell? Would you feel good about telling it? What did you live for if you had no challenge to overcome?

We need challenges in our lives to give us motivation, to give our lives meaning, and to make our life stories interesting. Between the challenges we embrace and those we don’t but have to deal with, we would highly prefer the former. However, the latter can sometimes be the ones that end up being much more meaningful, so they’re not all bad. Perhaps you can attest to this yourself when you identify the challenges you are facing, or have faced, or maybe anticipate facing like some inevitabilities.

Instead of separating challenges in my life into those I embraced and those I had to deal with, I wrote only one motivational mantra for both. I didn’t want to constantly remind myself that a challenge for which I was motivating myself was one I had to deal with rather than one I chose to embrace independently. No. A challenge is a challenge, taking it on is taking it on, and that meant embracing all challenges in the same way and spirit. Given how essential I see challenges are to life, I framed my challenge mantra at the highest level of context to me, life itself, to reaffirm to myself each time I chant it, that a life without challenges is a life wasted.

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This post is one of 70 quotes I wrote, each with an accompanying essay, in my e-book and paperback Stars I Put in my Sky to Live By, on Amazon or Smashwords (choose your price including free!).