2 Difficult Ideas All Successful People Embrace To Fuel Their Growth

Success doesn’t come easy.

It takes relentless focus, work, and consistency in areas that push you beyond your comfort zone. If successful people didn’t push themselves beyond their comfortability limits, their careers would be vastly different.

If I didn’t embrace challenges, would I have had fewer struggles? Less crap smeared on my face? Less heartache? Headache?

Absolutely.

But life is meant to live. We’re human beings, not human doings. A part of being is learning new things and accepting challenges. Learning to embrace failure and the core lessons failure teaches.

Successful people embrace a little daily friction for compounding results:

Idea 1: Build challenges into your day.

Your days should never come easy.

Peter Diamandis recommends a challenge to skill ratio to enter a state of flow.

“Our attention is most engaged when there’s a superficial relationship between the difficulty of a task and our ability to perform it. Flow happens near the emotional midpoint between boredom and anxiety.”

Growth occurs under small amounts of resistance.

It’s what scientists call the flow channel, “the sport where the task is hard enough to make us stretch, but not hard enough to make us snap.”

Idea 2: Be uncomfortable.

“In times of peace, prepare for war,” said Niccolò Machiavelli.

It means to be prepared. You can’t learn to swim without getting in the water. You can’t learn to hold your breath underwater as a child without making the mistake of trying to breathe underwater.

Life is worth living, and living is pushing yourself to be uncomfortable. Being uncomfortable prepares you for times of hardship.

The Stoics used to practice temporary poverty where they would live as though they were poor.