Comfort. Let’s think about that for a second. Don’t get it twisted, comfort feels wonderful. It’s reassuring, safe, and protective. A comfortable evening is predictable, but in a good way. You know what you’re getting. Now, that’s great, but say you repeat that pattern, repeatedly. You choose comfort every day and night. That safety net isn’t just present, it completely wraps around your life.
Soon, the comfort can begin to feel too soft. Suddenly, it’s too hard to get up. Comfort is wonderful and necessary in all of our lives, but not wholly. Like everything, balance is needed. Discomfort – often in the form of truths you don’t want to hear – is essential in your journey to success, whatever that may look like.
Think of the bow and arrow. One of humankind’s oldest and most revolutionary weapons – the oldest known bows are between 8,000 and 11,000 years old, while the first evidence of arrowheads dates to over 60,000 years old. While ancient, the weapon’s engineering simplicity provides a valuable lesson, thousands of years forward. It may be a cliché in some way, but an arrow must first be pulled back before it can be released forward. Sometimes, you need to hear an uncomfortable truth to propel yourself into a more prosperous future.
Ironically, it’s time to give comfort a rest, lodge yourself in a bowstring and let go of your safety net. Let’s start by unpacking a few uncomfortable truths about success.
1. Success Requires Sacrifice
Everyone wants success, let’s be honest. It can mean something different to you and the next reader – priorities can both simultaneously overlap and differ from person to person. Yet, despite this, the road to success often pits people against their ultimate goals. It’s easy to imagine your goals coming to fruition, but picturing the journey is a far more troublesome challenge.
For starters, the road to success is rarely every glamorous. For example, while Formula 1 driver Lewis Hamilton has glory, fame, and boatloads of money now, the years his father spent pulling multiple jobs to afford Lewis’ go-kart, on top of the years of competition as a kid, represent the gritty side to success. It requires immense sacrifice.
Sacrifice of time, comfort, and in many cases, relationships.
In your pursuit of success, there may be not time to play video games or see friends. There may not even be time for as much of the simple pleasures, such as going to the cinema or indulging at the weekends. You may also need to cut ties with friends in your life that you’ve outgrown. It happens to everyone, everywhere.
But the great thing about sacrifice is the reward can prove abundant. Remember – the arrow must be pulled back before flying towards its target.
2. Failure is Inevitable
When you’re growing up, everything feels intense. Your emotions are flying all over the place as hormones flood your brain and body, and everything feels like the most important thing in the world, whether that’s how many friends you have, the kind of clothes you wear, the relationships you’re exploring, or, of course, grades. Every failure feels like the end of the world. Teenage years are often a constant push for unattainable perfection and subsequent disappointment. But that’s the thing. As a teenager, you don’t realise that failure is an essential part of your development and, ultimately, the road to success.
Failure is a word with immensely negative connotations. After all, it’s the opposite of success, right? I disagree. Failure and success are two sides of the infamous double-edged sword – one does not come without the other. Failure will happen throughout your life, but it does not define who you are. Most importantly, it’s a lesson – one that, if you act on, can be a learning point in your journey to success.
So, while losing your job – for instance – may sting right now, this will be a mere stepping stone in the long run.
Once again, we come around to the bow and arrow. To go forward, you must go back. Failure may feel like a step back, but in the long run, just like the flight of an arrow, a step back won’t even be visible.
Ancient wisdom.
3. Talent Isn’t Enough
To explain this sufficiently, let’s take a look at football. As the world’s most popular sport, millions upon millions of young people attempt to become the next Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo – or even just turn professional. In the UK, a recent study found that a mere 180 in every 1.5 million young players will sign a professional contract, with an astonishing 99.88% forced to take a different path.
Admittedly, there are likely factors out of the young hopeful’s control – you can’t help it if others are simply better than you. However, what those players – and you, of course – can do, is ensure you don’t rely on talent to get you where you need to be. Sure, talent is great. It can help you get noticed, but longevity lies in hard work. Talent can exist on its own, but without nurturing, its potential is often wasted.
The takeaway from this message? You can’t rest on your laurels if you want to become successful. The bow and arrow are exceptional creations on their own, but without a person strong enough to pull the bowstring, it’s useless. Let talent grow in the garden of hard work.
4. Not Everyone Will Support You
In an ideal word, peers and those you interact with will support any move toward success. After all, everyone is on their own journey. Or so you’d think, anyway. As more and more of our lives become visible due to the increasingly invasive powers of social media companies, your journey to success will likely force you to deal with haters and unsupportive peers.
Let’s take online writing, or this article for instance. Posting online sends your work out to the world, ready for anyone to look and form an opinion. Some will like it and move on; others will dislike it and make sure you’re aware. Many people – especially people you know – may act unsupportive out of jealousy. Stepping towards success sees you confronting your discomfort. Believe it or not, many people are too scared to ever do that.
Haters sit in the same bracket as failure. It’s inevitable if you’re serious about success (it’s inevitable regardless), but what matters is how you let it affect your journey.
5. Perfection is a Myth
The perfect moment doesn’t exist. Things just happen, and forever more, a once random day becomes a pivotal moment in your life. If you sit and wait for the perfect moment to start a course, publish online, or begin a new career, you’ll be waiting forever. The same principle applies when you’re trying to finish something and move on. It can feel difficult to accept a project is finished because that means all of the work and effort you’ve put in has now reached the finality of its purpose. Accepting you’re finished means it’s time to think about what’s next. This can prove challenging, especially when you’re emotionally invested in the work you’re doing. But the longer you strive for perfection, the longer you’ll be waiting to find success.
Get started, right away. Don’t wait for the perfect moment.
6. Discomfort Leads to Growth
Stepping out of your comfort zone is necessary.
Ah, this feels familiar. Ending where we began. Before this article wraps up, think about how much change has occurred in your life. For most of you reading, there’s probably a fair amount to reference. Now, think about the period before the change. It likely feels a million miles away at this point – a speck in your rear-view mirror.
Regardless of whether you knew the change was coming or if it was a complete surprise, the time beforehand can often feel unthinkable, unfathomable even. You know it’s there, but like the bow and arrow, it feels ancient.
That journey you’re pondering is the growth you’ve experienced. The feeling of nervous excitement mixed with dread is the discomfort that propelled you to where you are now. And so, the cycle goes.
Life will always change. Seek the discomfort. And, of course, go backwards to go forwards.
