It can be exciting to push yourself to climb higher, write more, go longer, fight harder. There’s a thrill about setting new records and going beyond what you thought you could do.

You write more than you ever have before. You hiked farther and higher than you thought you could. You created that huge project and completed it! You organized that massive event. You read twice as many books as you were trying to.

All of that is great! Exciting! But wait.

Does this mean you should keep pushing? Keep trying to set new records, make bigger and better and faster and farther goals?

For everything there is a season. And that means pushing yourself too.

It’s good to see how far you can push, how much you can accomplish. You learn that you CAN do more than just get by. You CAN accomplish hard things. And that’s good. I learned that I could write 60k words in a month. It was exciting! It was tempting to try to write 70k words.

But . . .

I realized some things.

1. While it was fun and exciting to write 60k words in a month, I also meant that it took almost a full month to be able to write at a normal pace again.
2. I can push myself to write a lot of words in a month or a day, but that means I have to say no to other things. I hardly read that month which meant my well of words was running low.
3. In order to write that many words, I had to switch around in stories a lot and ended up working on a dozen different things and only finishing one of them. This meant I had a lot of started stories all jumbled up and trying to get out of my brain at once.

Sometimes you need to know that you can push yourself to bigger and better, and faster and farther. But sometimes you need to find a steady pace that you can keep going for longer times. It’s good to know that you can do more, but ask yourself the questions: Should I? Is it worth it in the long run? If you take a slinky and stretch it and play with it, it can be fun, but if you stretch it too much it will break.

If you are going to end up having to sit around waiting for stories to come back, or for blisters to heal, or to recover from exhaustion when you could have kept a steady pace and continued on, is it worth it? Perhaps it is once. You saw you could do more. And perhaps you found a new pace that is better than your old one that you can now do. But please, don’t think that just because you can push yourself, you should always do so. Don’t burn out because you pushed too hard too often.

Have you ever pushed yourself and set new records and then set more new records? Have you ever regretted pushing yourself? Have you ever done something hard and while you are grateful for the challenge, realized that you don’t have to push quite so hard?