A Better Way To Think About Comfort Zones

Nowadays, talking about your comfort zone is like bumping into someone you know at a tourist trap in your city.  

‘I’m not really here.’

‘I’m on my way to something.’

‘It’s not what you think.’

We feel like we have to convince people that we’re on our way to something greater, or else we’ll risk being that person who’s still circling the same shit years later.

But lately, I started to think that it’s dangerous to think of comfort zone in this way.

See, about a week ago I moved to a new apartment in the middle of Melbourne’s CBD. Unlike the suburbs where I had to drive for half an hour to get a whiff of civilisation, I’m now surrounded by cafes, shopping strips, mangy pubs and cinemas.

With all this new stuff around me, it became easier than ever to catch up with friends who also live around the city.

And out of all the conversations, a consistent theme runs through all:

Everyone’s consumed by needing to be somewhere else.

A writer friend wants to jump to the day when her novel’s finished.

A filmmaker friend is dying to fly to South America to shoot a documentary.

And an actor friend is pining after those days when he was auditioning for odd roles in London.

I’m not an exception to the rule. Now, a week into moving into my new place, I’m already pining after the day when I can have a new coffee table, when I have 20k saved up, when my book gets published, yada, yada, yada.

And that’s really the crux of this comfort zone problem. Most of us think that pushing ourselves out of our comfort zones is all about doing more work, cooking a more exotic meal, getting a better career, writing a better book, directing a better short film or landing a better acting role.

Whereas in fact, what we really crave is a different reality.

We’re at our happiest when we periodically push ourselves into a completely different state of being.

Whereas if we push ourselves just because, we’ll eventually turn into obsessive optimisation machines.

Let’s ground this in an example.

Person A and person B both want to be great at their jobs.

Person A’s approach is to optimise their workflow, deliver projects weeks in advance, sacrifice their downtime, cosy up to upper management and use their promotion as a gauge for how well they’re doing.   

Person B, however, is obsessed with seeing a different reality through their work. They use every project as a learning window, ask intriguing questions about how the company functions, and begin to understand how their work fits into the larger context of the world around them.

A year later, person A is burnt out, resentful and obsessive beyond repair. Whereas person B becomes a rare talent in the company because they’ve developed an irreplaceable perspective on problems others struggle to solve.

In other words, person B has pushed into a new reality. They didn’t just grow; they’ve become a different person entirely.

And when I tally up all the best inflection points in my life, I notice that this theory stands true for every major turning point in my life.

My month-long trip to Europe after graduating shifted my perspective on the world. All of a sudden, I saw my life in my city as a tiny cog in a gargantuan world full of other cultures and traditions.

My martial arts journey revealed a quieter aspect of discipline that changed how I approach everything else in life.

My recent obsession with cooking taught me that food is something sacred, and it shouldn’t be scoffed down or be treated as a mere commodity.

And the common theme among all these perspective shifts is that they’re permanent. There’s a clear before and after, and this is the most amount of growth we can experience.

Whereas most growth that we idolise in our culture is temporary. Think about a new gadget to track your fitness, a new AI app that optimises a tiny part of your life or a kitchen gadget that promises to change everything. They only modify your surroundings slightly without creating the permanent shift that we’re really craving.

This isn’t to say that temporary improvements are useless, but they have to be in the context of anticipating larger shifts or else we’ll keep collecting gadgets and habits that lead nowhere.

So, in the future, whenever you set a goal, start a new project, move to a new place, check it against this question:

Does this allow me to live in a different reality? Or am I just modifying who/what I am incrementally?

Because if we ever lose sight of this version of growth, we’ll keep wasting energy on meaningless goals that keep us trapped in the same 24 hours.

P.S.

For a while now, I’ve wanted to push A Mug of Insights beyond just an instructional resource for writers/lifelong learners.

I wanted to share ideas/lessons that, yes, definitely impact our lives as writers/readers, but I also want something more.

As I stand now, I’m itching to tell you about what I learned from sparring a black belt at a tournament, from catching a late sunset, from being an author alongside full-time work, and all those profound lessons that marked pivotal points in my journey.

You’ll start to see a shift in the coming weeks, and things will be different. But like all great inflection points in my life, I can only see things clearly in retrospect.

And I’m keen to see what I’ll make of this special period of my life alongside you in a few years.

Until next week

Robin