What I have come to realize is that the trough of despair isn’t just normal, it’s essential. The negative feelings you experience in the trough tell you whether the work you’re doing is hard or complex enough to deserve your full creative attention. Only challenges that don’t have easy answers require you to take the kinds of difficult creative leaps that lead to breakthroughs. Only work that requires you to push yourself to develop new skills—not just deploy the ones you already have—keeps you on the edge of your own learning curve and, therefore, reaching toward your full potential.