#4On #dailychallenge on Leadership, we post a daily question on the topic of leadership. The point? Give the humans a daily reason to come and converse. After running #dailychallenge for a few weeks, I handed off the baton to an active participant on the channel. Now, each week, a new Slacker runs the challenge for the week only to nominate someone else for the next. This model of an active engaged leader posting an interesting question each week day, #dailychallenge is guaranteed to have a healthy conversation on any given day with a fresh new voice each week.
The basic concept of #tinychallenges is to create a task that is so simple that you cannot, not do it. Because we’re all pretty much narcissistic egotists the biggest problem we have is that no matter how small and confined the challenge is you’ll still have trouble getting out of your own way.
What would be great is to have a Slack community or even just a mail list (two-way, non-broadcast) that lets you have conversations with the people doing similar things as you are during a given challenge run. There would be “coaches” that have done 5 or more challenges that could help you craft your challenge definition, be harder on you in the planning stage to make sure it was something you could stick with. Later during the challenge the entire community could help to ensure that everyone is meeting their own goals.
As you get further into your first daily challenge a couple of things happen that are common to pretty much anyone that thinks critically about what they do. Those lessons and wisdom should be shared as openly as possible because it is crucial to understand that acknowledging the fact that it’s okay to “fail” at these is entirely the point of doing it. Once you recognize that there’s no real pressure you’ve removed one of the worst barriers to simply being creative or successful in your goals. Both because you’ve designed your challenge to be finite, and that there is only ever going to be positive encouragement from the community and never strict judgement. This needs to be a thing.