If It Doesn’t Challenge You, It Doesn’t Change You

Life is busy, and times are tough. Motivation is fleeting, and temptations are literally everywhere. We’re always on the move and are trying to maintain our social lives amid everything else that demands our attention. Ay Yi Yi!

If you don’t have challenges to face and risks of failure to confront, you won’t change. When your life is largely ruled by your habits and things are predictable, there’s really no need for you to buck the status quo. There’s no reason to do things differently. But if we don’t change, that also means we won’t improve. We need to change in order to grow and become better versions of ourselves. We can’t develop very much as people by holding fast to the reins of certainty and stability and never testing our limits.

Like Gaiman says, I was in China in 2007, at the first party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention in Chinese history. And at one point I took a top official aside and asked him Why? SF had been disapproved of for a long time. What had changed?

It’s simple, he told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them the plans. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did not imagine. So they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves. And they found that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls.