My son recently put together a lamp that was part of an engineering kit designed for children. After he was finished, I noticed a few extra parts in the box. I asked him about them.

“Yeah. Those were kind of tricky to install, so I skipped them.”

I laughed. It’s a totally natural thing to do: find a way to work around the tricky parts.

And this can be a good survival skill — a strategy for keeping forward motion.

But in the long run, it pays to figure out the tricky parts. In many endeavors, the tricky parts are what stand between good-enough and remarkable.