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Your Biggest Challenge Is Your Secret Weapon

How to work with your limitations, not against them

Phil Hansen
Forge
4 min readOct 21, 2020

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Woman stepping through an opening in the wall, head not visible, her leg in the air.
Photo: Klaus Vedfelt/Getty Images

Our society does a great job at inspiring, encouraging, and some­times even demanding that we dream big and aim for uniqueness. I’ve fallen for it, too. I spent years of my life pushing myself to think as originally as I possibly could whenever I was brainstorming new art projects. But what I seem to learn over and over again is that the grand, super-original ideas I have, the ones that are truly outside the box, are also so far outside my realm of possibil­ity that they’re almost useless.

So, at a cer­tain point, I began to resist the idea of thinking wildly outside the box.

This small mental shift continues to have huge implications on my life and creativity. I decided: Instead of trying to shoot for the crazy huge idea and waiting months or years to do so, why not focus my creativity to work with what I have, and literally use the limitations of my life to push me cre­atively? When I realized this, it took my work to a transcendent place.

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Forge
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Published in Forge

A former publication from Medium on personal development. Currently inactive and not taking submissions.

Phil Hansen
Phil Hansen

Written by Phil Hansen

An artist whose mixed media work has lead him to speak at TED, a Guinness World Record, and being made fun of by Wendy Williams. Life is interesting.

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