Exercise 1 — Move the load, hold the verb

The ladder above has three rungs. Write one below rung one, passable by someone who currently fails it, and one above rung three. Fourteen words each, maximum. The verb stays identical in all five.

How to tell it's any good. Read your two new rungs to someone who has not seen the drill and ask which is harder. If they cannot tell, your rungs differ in topic rather than in load. If either rung changed what the person does — added a step, softened the sentence, gave them longer — you moved the verb and the ladder is no longer a ladder. And if your rung zero is "the same thing, but in an area of life I care less about," you have changed domain rather than load, and nothing learned there will show up at rung two.