It’s true. Doesn’t matter if it’s true. Hate them.
“Just be yourself,” and “Do what you love and you’ll never work again,” and “Life begins where your comfort zone ends.”
Cliches are like hit songs without a good hook.
It’s like just hearing them triggers a muscle in the back of my eyes, causing them to roll back into my head and I can’t do anything about it.
But the comfort zone one bugs me, not just because it’s not true, but because I can’t get down with any advice that tells me I should be ok with things that feel bad.
Also:
NO ONE likes being uncomfortable. And anyone who claims they do? Just has their own idea of what comfort is. And it likely isn’t mine.
My point is that leaving your comfort zone makes no sense, since you’re not at your best outside of it.
One of the most famous management and leadership thinkers Marcus Buckingham said this in his 2019 Harvard Business Review story, “The Feedback Fallacy”:“We’re often told that the key to learning is to get out of our comfort zones, but these findings contradict that particular chestnut,” he writes. “Take us very far out of our comfort zones, and our brains stop paying attention to anything other than surviving the experience.”
And yet, we persist in torturing ourselves. How? By forcing ourselves to do things we hate, or telling ourselves we should do things we hate so that we can STOP BEING COMFORTABLE. As if that’s your biggest problem.
You know what else doesn’t work?
I’ll tell you right here in Part 1 of this free 3-part video series, “Why You Can Stay in Your Comfort Zone,” — available only to people on my list (like you!).