Openness to Challenge

The tendency to avoid challenge is so omnipresent in human beings that it can properly be considered a characteristic of human nature. But calling it natural does not mean it is essential or beneficial or unchangeable behavior. It is also natural to defecate in our pants and never brush our teeth. Yet we teach ourselves to do the unnatural until the unnatural becomes itself second nature. Indeed, all self-discipline might be defined as teaching ourselves to do the unnatural. Another characteristic of human nature – perhaps the one that makes us most human – is our capacity to do the unnatural, to transcend and hence transform our own nature.

From The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck. M.D., which I am (obviously) recommending.