Feeling Stuck in Your Career? Take the Sistine Chapel Challenge

Do the impossible, even if you think you can’t — especially if you think you can’t.

Photo by Marcel Smits on Unsplash

Machines scan us and flag hiring managers only if we’re a perfect fit. We are paper, an applicant until the machines determine otherwise. We hire people off the assembly line to create the widget they’ve spent their lives building. We reduce humans to decimal points and calculate their margins for error because we’re terrified of risk. Risk is the plague from which we run screaming.

Bombastic inner shouts tell us it’ll never work, drowning out the whisper of maybe it will. Our fear is louder than bombs.

This week, I learned the story behind Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel from Eric Weiner’s The Geography of Genius. Michelangelo was a morose fellow, prone to shouting barbs at his long-time rival, Leonardo Da Vinci on the streets of Florence. He was the kind of guy you wouldn’t have over for a drink, but one you’d admire from afar. Unwashed, unkempt, terse, he made room in the miniature box that was his heart for his one love — art. Everything else was a distraction. Pre-Sistine, Michelangelo was known as a sculptor. Sure, he fiddled with frescoes and small paintings on wood, but nothing on the level and scale of what would become one of the…