Chase difficulty because growth lives there, not because applause might.

Difficulty is where you actually change, because it is the only place your current abilities are insufficient. Applause, meanwhile, tends to gather around whatever is legible and impressive to onlookers, which is often not the same territory at all. If you pick your hard things by where the recognition is, you can spend years being visibly stretched without ever growing.

Look at the challenge in front of you and ask whether you would still take it if nobody knew you had. Then look for the difficulty in your work that no one else can see, the part you keep steering around. That one usually holds the growth.