The First Obstacle of the Early Life

The First Minor Challenge is the first of the challenge numbers drawn from the birth date: it is the absolute difference between the reduced birth month and the reduced birth day. In the four-part challenge scheme it governs the earliest stretch of life, the formative years in which its particular obstacle is said to be most keenly felt. Numerologists read it as the first recurring difficulty a person meets, the lesson set at the outset, and pair it with the Second Minor Challenge and the derived Main Challenge to map the pattern of obstacles across a lifetime.

The birth-date challenges, this one among them, are generally associated with Balliett's own line of the system more directly than the name-derived challenges are, since they need no letter chart at all, only the month, day and year already present in a birth date; Cheiro's 1926 Book of Numbers worked chiefly with names, and it is Florence Campbell's 1931 and Juno Jordan's 1965 books that are usually credited with folding the birth-date subtractions into the same challenge framework as the name-based ones. Not every modern numerologist derives a challenge from the birth date at all: Dan Millman's widely read 1993 book The Life You Were Born to Live works from the single Life Path number, without any minor-challenge apparatus layered onto it, a reminder that the birth-date challenge scheme described throughout this family of articles is a particular, mid-century elaboration rather than a feature of modern numerology as such.