What’s the secret to completing difficult tasks? If we can learn how to consistently overcome challenging obstacles, we can reduce our reliance on others, feel more capable and powerful, and take on bigger and more rewarding projects. If we give up too soon, we sell ourselves short, abort promising career directions, and become too reliant on other people’s expertise.

I think there is a secret to consistently getting the hard stuff done. But first a story …

We’d been having some trouble with our telephone and internet service. Dropped calls in the middle of important conference calls, internet outages in the middle of gigantic uploads, calls getting dropped after one ring, and so on. Incredibly frustrating, and bad for business.

After seven different support calls and one site visit from sonic.net (all fruitless), and one site visit from Bay Alarm (sonic.net thought the problem was related to our alarm system), I realized the best remaining option was the fix it myself.