The thrill of being challenged

When I was a kid, I hated chores, especially the ones I was told or forced to do without any possibility of saying no without some serious consequences. Talk about a “stick” base education and culture! 

So, as I was executing these chores reluctantly, the job quality was borderline if not downright poor, the time it took to do them was endless for the supervising recipient and seemed endless to me, the lowly worker, and as a result, no one was happy, which resulted in a typical downright spiral. 

Now that I’m a big boy, have chores totally disappeared from my life? Absolutely not! They still rear their ugly heads every now and then, but whenever I can remember to do so, I turn them into a mind challenge like a tiny Everest to be climbed or a Hahnenkamm downhill ski race that needs speed and precision. 

Then, suddenly, the chore become much more palatable, it loses its drudgery and it can even turn into a fun game. The only challenge with that approach is that, in most cases it’s not my “default mode”, I need to remind myself to transform the abject chore into a glorious challenge and my imagination generally does the rest...