Recently, I paid money to get my butt kicked.
I joined a 10-day business challenge built around one question: “What would it look like to operate at 10x your current level?”
The assignment sounded simple. Come up with 10 things that would push your edge, then complete them before the challenge ended.
The Hard Part in Growth Wasn’t Execution
I assumed execution would be the hardest part.
Instead, I spent nearly 3 days trying to come up with the list.
This totally threw me off. Ideation is usually one of my strongest skills. I can generate possibilities all day.
But this exercise was different. The ideas had to be audacious enough to stretch me, practical enough to act on within 10 days, and useful enough to support the business I wanted to be running by the end of the year.
After more than 45 minutes going back and forth with GPT, I finally posted my first list.
Then the challenge host asked the group a pointed question:
Was this really the maximum we could do? Did the list represent us operating fully and without holding back?
I looked at mine again and immediately saw the problem.
Some of my “bold” ideas were total cop-outs.
One was to identify a recurring part of my work that I did not enjoy, then redesign, delegate, or remove it. On the surface, that could be a meaningful challenge.
But I have done it many times before. I was not expanding my capabilities. I was simply addressing something I had postponed. Clearly, this did not belong to my edge list.
An Overdue Task Is Not a Growth Edge
Another was to make a clear decision about a client relationship I already knew was no longer right.
Except I had already made the decision.
The honest version should have been: Let the unfit client go before the challenge ends.
Even then, it was not really my edge. I had ended client relationships before. I had even been hired to fire people in an earlier chapter of my career. It was uncomfortable, but it was familiar.
That distinction mattered.
An overdue task is not automatically a growth edge.
Something can feel difficult because we have avoided it, not because it requires us to become more capable.
I suspect this gets harder for seasoned business owners.
When you are starting out, it may be easier to find 10 things that scare you. You are doing many things for the first time.
But after you have been in business for a while, you have survived some things.
You have lost a major client unexpectedly. You have watched a forgotten annual subscription hit your bank account at the worst possible time. You have received a cease-and-desist letter that looked baseless but still had to be handled. You have made painful decisions, changed direction, recovered, and kept going.
You have been around a few corners.
Experience expands your capacity, but it can also make your real edge harder to see.
3 days later, my final list included bigger declarations: publicly announcing what I no longer offer in my business, saying a $15,000 price to a qualified buyer, pitching someone I considered to be a heavyweight in the industry, and publishing real numbers where people could judge both what worked and what failed.
The Challenge I Couldn’t Complete
But the item that exposed me most was deceptively simple:
Make one additional sale within the 7 days remaining in the challenge.
Anything already in my pipeline did not count. It had to be a fresh and somewhat unpredictable sale.
It did not happen.
That failure showed me something more useful than a symbolic win would have.
I could complete many of the more dramatic tasks through courage and decisive action. But I could not reliably create a new sale on demand within 7 days.
That was not just a confidence gap. It was a business-model gap.
My sales still depended too heavily on relationships, active conversations, and opportunities I had personally cultivated. The business did not yet have enough repeatable ways to generate demand outside that pipeline.
The challenge ended, but I am still working on that item.
The Business Growth Mindset Shift That Actually Changes Everything
I also watched others grow in ways that looked different from mine, yet carried the same underlying shift.
For one person, growth meant working up the courage to return to former clients and share a new offer. The first outreach may have felt awkward and exposing. But after doing it, something changed.
It became: This is who I am now. This is what I do.
That is when growth becomes yours.
Not when you set the goal.
Not when you complete one brave action.
But when the thing that once required courage no longer requires a long internal conversation. That is how you know you now own and embody what used to feel hard.
Growth is not only expanding your opportunities.
It is expanding what feels normal.
I am still building toward the day when an unexpected Stripe notification, something that has happened only a few times in the past, is no longer an event.
It is just Tuesday.
To be honest, I did not expect to walk away with this lesson. And that was well worth experiencing in the middle of the year. Now I’m thrilled to have a new set of 10 edge items I’m going to tackle for the rest of the year.
What once felt unthinkable to you but is now simply part of how you operate?
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