At times I meet people who claim that they love being challenged and having to alter their beliefs. When I hear that statement I usually hold my enthusiasm.

You see there is one level of change that you can acquire by reading books and listening to people’s advice, but there is a more substantial level of change that you need to work with if you really want to revise who you are. That level requires a large amount of discipline and practice and involves the never-ending struggle with you, yourself and your stubbornness. And it’s painful.

There is a common test to exemplify this where one is asked to close both hands together as if to do a prayer. In this particular movement one of two thumbs is put on top of the other. This is a trained behaviour of the brain, and doing it differently usually feels odd. Studies show you would have to repeat putting the wrong thumb on top 200-300 times before it feels natural.

For me, challenging myself involves limiting focus to a few concrete points. These 1,2,3 characteristics of myself that I want to do something about I need to be able to work on every day. Every day involves dissolving the resistance barrier and introducing the revised behaviour by force. If this is not painful to you, perhaps you are not challenging yourself yet.

Per David Jonsson is a member of Sandbox and a young Swedish entrepreneur currently living in Linköping, Sweden. Among other projects, he has co-founded Omnicloud, a cloud-based software for industrial turnkey suppliers, Media People, a web agency using talented students to develop web applications at low cost, and the Young Entrepreneurs of Sweden, the biggest organization for young entrepreneurs in the country.