Comfort Will Ruin Your Life.

Wake up tired.

Scroll TikTok for 15 minutes.

Rush to get to a job you hate.

Get stuck in traffic on the way.

Spend 8 hours doing work that means nothing to you.

Rush to get home.

Get stuck in traffic on the way.

Order a pizza.

Scroll TikTok.

Watch Netflix for 4 hours.

Go to bed.

Scroll TikTok for 30 minutes.

Fall asleep.

Repeat.

In this post, I want you to keep a certain image in your mind.

I want you to take a minute and think about the average person around you.

Seriously, do this.

Think about how they spend their time.

Think about what they do for work.

Think about if they truly enjoy what they do for work.

Think about if they are living a life that they’ll feel proud of in 40 years.

Think about if you would enjoy their life.

Chances are, if you truly decipher and break down the areas of people’s lives and if that area brings them happiness and fulfillment, you’ll find that most people aren’t living a life they love.

They’re living life at just a fraction of the potential that they have.

They’re following a path they don’t want to follow but have been told by society that that path is the only way to walk.

At every moment they’re falling victim to their vices to hide from reality and the responsibility of taking their life into their own hands.

They’re directionless.

They’re depressed, anxious, and lack fulfillment.

And if they were given the option, they would completely change their lives - or at least many aspects of it.

Whether it’s what they do for work, how much money they earn, what they do in their spare time, or how much free time they have.

But what most people don’t realise, is that they have this option.

They can, if they’re willing to figure out what they truly want in life, who they want to become, and what they need to do to get there, completely change their life.

So if this choice is right in front of all of us, why do only a select few people take it?

Why do so many people just mindlessly fall into complacency and just accept the position they’re in?

Why is there more depression, anxiety, and a lack of fulfillment than ever?

Well, it’s because we’re no longer fighting for survival.

Let me explain…

For the entirety of human history, we had to fight to survive, we had to earn everything and we were never comfortable.

Yet in the last 100 years, everything’s changed rapidly.

You’re no longer hunting wooly mammoths or fending off saber tooth tigers.

You get to order Uber eats and spend your time scrolling on a screen designed to steal your attention.

You’re comfortable.

You embrace comfort and instant gratification at every moment, at every spare chance.

Yet, your software, your DNA, your essence, is still the same as your ancestors from 1000’s of years ago.

The Problem With Comfort

You’re not designed to be mindlessly going through life with no challenge or discomfort.

It’s what makes you thrive and when you don’t have it, something feels wrong.

The problem today is that unless you voluntarily take on challenge and discomfort, you’re never going to experience it in any way that will move you toward the place you want to go - this is even more true if you don’t know where that place is.

But why is a life of comfort bad?

Why is it the downfall of modern society?

Why is comfort killing you?

Well if you’re comfortable with something, it’s not challenging you, it’s not pushing you.

If it’s not pushing you toward your edge, it’s effortless.

If it’s effortless, if you’re not on your edge or pushing your boundaries, you’re not putting anything worthwhile out there into the world, so you get nothing worthwhile out of the word.

You don’t progress. You don’t improve.

And as a human, you are obsessed with progress - for our primal selves and our ancestors, it was the only way to survive.

If you didn’t improve, you weren’t adding to the tribe, you weren’t pulling your own weight - hence, you were holding the tribe back and you were more likely to be a liability.

You would fall down the status hierarchy due to your lack of competency and eventually be ostracised or killed in the wild.

The only way to survive was to improve for the benefit of both you and those around you, so you became obsessed with improvement.

Obsessed with proving your competency with progress and pushing your limits, benefiting both you and the tribe.

This is still engrained in our psyches today, especially for men.

So when you embrace comfort and instant gratification from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep, you lack the opportunity for progress and so something feels missing.

You become anxious. You feel depressed. You lack fulfillment.

3 things that are signs from your mind that you’re doing something wrong and that you need to make a change.

Your mind is telling you there’s a problem and it’s up to you to fix it.

But the problem with comfort is how it hooks you in.

You get complacent and comfortable with your comfort and lack of progress, so you don’t take risks or make changes.

Comfort is a new phenomenon.

Your mind doesn’t know how to process it, it plays into primal systems in your brain releasing dopamine - a feel-good neurotransmitter that’s supposed to be earned to urge us to do the right thing for our survival that’s now being manipulated by modern food, social media, and comfort.

It keeps you hooked and complacent.

It keeps you stuck where you are.

Which if you like where you are, that’s fine.

But if you want more, if you know deep inside you that you’re destined for greatness, if you want to achieve something worth achieving, if you want to become all you could be, or even just get out of the hole that you’re in, this is a problem.

This complacency that comfort keeps you in causes you to lose self-respect.

You know you’re not doing what you need to do, that you’re avoiding responsibility and meaning, creating a downward spiral of less self-respect and therefore a greater chance of you doing worse habits, a lower chance of you doing good habits, ruining your self-respect further.

But most of all, the major problem with comfort is the obvious one.

When you’re comfortable, there’s no discomfort.

There’s no challenge.

You’re not pushing yourself to your edge forcing improvement and progress.

Because that’s what discomfort does.

When you’re uncomfortable, it’s a sign that what you’re doing is just outside what you’re capable of, it’s a signal for your body and mind to grow, to improve, to progress.

And with that progress you feel good and fulfilled because you know you’re doing what you need to do, you know you’re improving your competency, climbing the status hierarchy, and improving your chances of not only surviving but prospering.

Instead of chasing instant gratification and cheap dopamine, you earn your dopamine, you rewire what your mind wants to do to feel good.

Instead of chasing mediocrity and comfort for pleasure, you chase progress and discomfort.

And you begin to respect yourself.

You’re doing what you know you need to do and you’re voluntarily shouldering the responsibility of improving your damn life.

This creates an upward spiral where you respect yourself more so you raise your standards making you more likely to do positive behaviours and less likely to do negative behaviours, causing you to respect yourself even more.

And if you have standards that are on your edge, progress and improvement become 2nd nature.

The Solution

The solution at this point is pretty obvious.

If you want to live a life worth living, one that’s full of progress, improvement, fulfillment, and meaning, you need to embrace discomfort.

With that, you could decide on your own how to go about this but I have 2 ways that I personally embrace discomfort and challenge myself each day that I’ll share with you and that I recommend you do.

A Daily Discomfort Habit

Like with everything, consistency is the most powerful way to experience the benefits of what you’re doing.

There’s no point in only challenging yourself when you want to challenge yourself because yes, it’s still a challenge and it’s hard but the true challenge is when you challenge yourself when you don’t want to challenge yourself.

So build a daily habit of getting uncomfortable.

Preferably, you’ll have multiple habits that force progress in multiple areas of your life - but if you’re currently drowning in comfort and the only discomfort you know is the discomfort of your comfort, start with just 1 habit and build up over time both in terms of the number of habits and the size of each habit.

I’d highly recommend the first habit you build to be working out.

No habit has so many cross-area benefits as working out.

You can then add in ice baths, reading, deep work, journaling, silence, running, or whatever other habit you can think of - there’s no shortage of what you can choose from.

The important thing is that you challenge yourself both physically and mentally.

So working out is a physical challenge but deep work - undistracted focused cognitive work on what will move you toward your goals - is a mental challenge.

You need both.

You can’t be physically jacked but mentally weak, you need to be jacked in every area of life possible.

And make sure you’re getting uncomfortable in a way that moves you toward your goals.

Let’s say you want to compete in bodybuilding, there’s no point you training for a marathon just because it’s hard.

Link your habits to your goals, this way because your goals, if you’ve set them correctly, will be big and meaningful, the work that’s required of you to achieve those goals will be both challenging and uncomfortable but most importantly, it’ll be meaningful.

Standards

Standards are the result of self-respect.

They are a level that you hold yourself to because you know that that is what you’re capable of and you won’t accept anything less.

Standards are non-negotiables and one of the best ways to push your boundaries and embrace discomfort in the name of progress.

You can and should set standards in every area of your life, but again, if you currently have no standards for yourself, start by making your habits from Solution 1 your standards.

Make them non-negotiable and something that you have to do no matter what, regardless of how you feel.

And trust me, you will never respect yourself more than by setting standards for yourself, not feeling like rising to the damn level required of you to meet them but doing it anyway.

Once you do it once, you realise you’re capable of so much more than you thought - that 1 experience of doing the work that you know you need to do regardless of how you feel is life-changing.

And I don’t say that lightly.

It changes your identity and how you see yourself and you instantly respect yourself.

But once you have those non-negotiable habits nailed as standards you need to set standards in every area of your life.

So ask yourself “If I could be all I could be, what would that look like?”

What would your habits be? Your mindset? Your mannerisms? Your behaviours? How would you spend your time?

Figure out what the best version of you looks like in every way and in excruciaing detail and then set them as your standard.

Make them your competition.

Because you need something to aim for, you need something to create meaning behind the standards - with your habits from solution 1, the meaning is the goal that the habits help you achieve, creating a reason for you to meet those standards and do those habits.

If you decide to set standards throughout every other area of your life but with no meaning behind them, you’ll not meet those standards for a long enough period of time for you to experience the benefits of them, so you need to create meaning behind them by using who you could be if you were all you could be as your competition.

Plus you need something to aim for.

You need someone to chase and a way to know what you want to achieve and who you want to become - if you don’t use the best version of yourself, you’ll use someone else who could be 10 years ahead you and have so many more advantages in life that its not a fair game, but when you chase the best version of you, the person with all your advantages and disadvantages - it’s a fight you can win.

So set your standards and take on the responsibility of rising to meet them at every step of the way.

- Ross

And when you’re ready, here’s how I can help you:

• Achieve Self-Mastery, unlock your true potential, and smash every goal you set with MasteryOS

• Join the waitlist for cohort 2 of Done In 4

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