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…a statement about how you feel is difficult to challenge.

For bosses… it’s not enough to discover talent that shouts. That much is easy. The great challenges come later, once such people are on the payroll.

Talent-rich organizations know this. They cater to people who are always looking for harder challenges, bigger arenas, and greater mastery.

To really inspire us, we need a challenge that outsizes the resources available… This is what leaders of great organizations do. They frame the challenge in terms so daunting that literally no one yet knows what to do or how to solve.

If the leaders of organizations give their people something to believe in, if they offer their people a challenge that outsizes their resources but not their intellect, people will give everything they’ve got to solve the problem.

When we feel like we belong to the group and trust the people with whom we work, we naturally cooperate to face outside challenges and threats.

If your job doesn’t provide both challenge and autonomy, and there’s nothing you can do to make things better, consider a move.

As long as we feel capable of meeting the challenge, we report being highly motivated, extremely interested, and positively engaged by stressful situations.

Games teach us how to create opportunities for freely chosen, challenging work that keeps us at the limits of our abilities, and those lessons can be transferred to real life.

…playing games can give us a taste of that elusive sense of individual agency and impact in a world where the work we do may be challenging, but our efforts often seem fruitless.