Fighting Extreme Comfort To Stay Productive
The extreme comfort we all seek can be our greatest enemy when it comes to productivity. It encourages superficiality and non-urgency. To counterbalance these shortcomings, we need to return to a certain amount of uncertainty and even, in some cases, precariousness.
A certain degree of precariousness creates urgency and therefore intensity; through the energy and involvement that one deploys, one has the possibility of “compressing” time.
What do you think of two people: one a civil servant and the other working independently?
One of them has a pension waiting for her after 40 years of work, the other one will not have one and will have to use her own capacity of enrichment by building up capital or in another way in order to create a future material security.
Which of these two people do you think will apply themselves more in their work and results? If we take into account only this criterion and they occupy similar functions – of course there are hundreds of parameters that influence motivation and involvement at work – . It’s a safe bet that it’s the latter.
Living in extreme comfort ultimately hinders your progress because it limits your intensity and commitment.
Challenging yourself and putting yourself in uncomfortable positions is necessary if you want to keep progressing and improving, no matter how well you’ve done.
Maintain The Beginner’s Mind
When you are a beginner, you are eager to learn. After a few years and some accomplishment, you feel like you’ve done it all, and you can become complacent and ultimately satisfied with a mediocre commitment. To combat this tendency, we need to use one of the differentiating levers in our work: skills, abilities, knowledge, sector, location, language, work style, processes in place, people we work with etc. The list can be endless.
Knowing how to always renew ourselves by playing with one or more criteria can allow us to constantly keep the beginner’s mind that allows us to reach and stay at the top and thus be able to achieve a better version of ourselves every day.
