In Self-Improvement: Meryn Stol voted up this answer. Jim Stone Get In Over Your Head. Work To Get Your Head Above Water. And Do It Over And Over Again. In other words, choose "anxiety-driven growth" over "boredom-driven growth". To explain what I mean, I'll use Jesse Schell's elaboration on Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s flow diagram: For Csikszentmihalyi, flow is a magical zone between anxiety and boredom. The vertical axis represents the size of the challenges we are facing. The horizontal axis represents the power of our skills in relation to those challenges. When our challenges exceed our skills (in the upper left part of the diagram), we feel anxiety. When our skills exceed our challenge (in the lower right part of the diagram), we feel boredom. When our skills and challenges are closely matched (the diagonal zone from lower left to upper right), we are in a sweet spot where we feel neither too much anxiety nor too much boredom. Csikszentmihalyi calls this diagonal channel the “flow... - Meryn Stol