The Second Minor Challenge is the second of the birth-date challenge numbers, the absolute difference between the reduced birth day and the reduced birth year. It complements the First Minor Challenge, and together the two are read as the twin difficulties of the earlier life, the recurring lessons drawn from the day-and-year and month-and-day pairings of the birth date. In the standard reading it colours a somewhat later stretch than the first, and its digit is interpreted through the ordinary meanings, a challenge of four bearing on order and discipline, of five on restlessness and excess, and so on.
Cheiro's 1926 Book of Numbers assigned each single digit a short descriptive character, order and discipline for four, restlessness and excess for five and so on, that later writers, Florence Campbell's 1931 Your Days Are Numbered and Juno Jordan's 1965 book among them, carried into the challenge readings this article uses; the keyword lists the four authors give do not agree word for word, which is itself evidence of a layered rather than a unified system. 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 paired birth-date challenges described throughout this family of articles are a particular, mid-century elaboration rather than a feature of modern numerology as such.