Regardless of the type of goal, my belief that goals must be difficult and joyless will wreck me at every turn. Many of us do this. We crave challenges that make us miserable, which is why adventure races are so popular right now. When the Tough Mudder race initially started, one of the obstacles you had to navigate was a field of live electrical wires. You spend your entire life trying to prevent your skin from ever touching a live wire, but on Tough Mudder day, you pay for that experience. When I was eight, I tried to press the coin return button on a Skee-Ball machine at Chuck E. Cheese’s.
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