build yourself into an unstoppable human (killing comfort book summary)

Summary

this is the walkthrough of my book Killing Comfort. the core argument: comfort is the overlooked enemy of extraordinary results. it doesn’t show up as a villain. it shows up as a recliner.

the book is structured in three parts:

1. understanding discomfort. what it actually is, why your brain runs from it, and why every result you want is on the other side of something you don’t want to do.

2. the traps of comfort. what I call the plagues of prosperity. as life gets easier, the choices that undermine your health, your performance, and your character get easier to make and harder to notice.

3. the Aviate Navigate Communicate framework. borrowed from aviation. aviate is your daily habits, keep the plane in the air. navigate is the plan, know where you’re going. communicate is teaching and serving others, you don’t fly alone.

the question that drives most of the book: would you follow you? would the person you see in the mirror inspire the team you’re trying to lead, the kids you’re trying to raise, the marriage you’re trying to build? if not, the work isn’t on the team or the kids or the marriage. it’s on you.

the book is a system, not a pep talk. that’s the whole point.

Transcript

why I wrote killing comfort

Stop trying to be so damn comfortable Successful people do not chase comfort and ease they chase hard Now I am the author of the book killing comfort I’m gonna be going over the concepts in this book at a high level so you can understand what this book is about and how To chase hard so you can be more successful Alright, so the reason I wrote this book Was because I’ve been coaching people both in business and in fitness and There’s always something that was stopping them from success, and it was never the tactical level The reason I wrote it is because there was a prerequisite to them getting there.

what the book is really about

That’s why the subtitle is the overlooked prerequisite to extraordinary results The overlooked prerequisite is getting uncomfortable.

It’s sticking with things It’s how to actually do that so that in a nutshell is what this book is about so if you are Interested in becoming a high performer seeing more success Read the book hey join the newsletter there should be a link somewhere description whatever of this episode You can download the first chapter, but I’m gonna be going over big picture each section of this book So it’s broken into really four sections.

introduction , discomfort is the prerequisite

There’s an introduction, and then there’s three parts 18 total chapters so the first part the introduction is just three chapters on Discomfort I’m just being uncomfortable It’s called press forward against your own desire that whole section the first three chapters and all I’m really doing in the first couple of chapters there is I’m selling you on the fact that Comfort is not our friend and a lot of people grew that it’s that you have to do hard things I go over historical examples.

I go over examples in nature I go over in all these examples of high performers, and why you want to get uncomfortable I’m just selling you on the idea in the first three chapters that Killing comfort is the goal hard is the goal easy is never the goal Comfort is never the goal even though you might think that’s what you’re after It should never be the goal And I don’t have to sell that today as much as I used to but people used to think it was I’m going to Become more successful so my life can become easier in some ways.

part 1 , the true cost of comfort (ch. 4 to 9)

That’s true But that you should always be chasing hard the obstacle is the way right you should be chasing hard in some way shape or form And I’m just selling you on that idea in the first three chapters now The second part of this book the part one is the official part one is chapter four five six seven eight and nine I go over the traps and in what I call this part is the true cost of comfort And I talk about all these different things and I’ll kind of summarize each one the first one is just comfort itself and it talks about how comfort is Incredibly sneaky like you don’t even if you don’t have the goal of like being comfortable And you’re completely sold on the idea already a lot of times Comfort just sneaks in there like you start to put in a little bit less effort in the workouts Or you earn more money, and so you are becoming a little bit more complacent It just sneaks into your life.

It’s not always the goal, so there’s some people who are like I’m just trying to go get comfortable I’m trying to choose easy if you’re watching this that’s probably not you But you have to know that comfort will sneak into your life And you have to bat it away every way you can so that’s chapter 4 chapter 5 is on prosperity This talks about again kind of that going up the ladder the more Successful you are the more money you have the easier it is to hit easy buttons all throughout your life in Prosperity I Talk about something I learned from Ben Bickman in an interview was called the plagues of prosperity And that’s what he’s calling most of the diseases today like you know type 2 diabetes Everything else like the things that we’re doing to ourselves in a health reason is because we have too much Access to anything that we could ever want on screens devices food like you name it We have access to all these things we’re living in the most prosperous times ever you know like What you are doing today?

How you live your life is like even far better than the greatest kings in the past right and so you have to know prosperity The more you climb that ladder the more success you get again more comfort will come and you have to fight that Another one chapter 6 is about ideas It’s just how ideas can limit your growth if you have ideas that are making you comfortable You might want to stick in that idea you want to get in a corner and defend that idea But you have to continually review your ideas and say hey is this idea serving me Is it moving me forward because it’s always more comfortable to hold on to our ideas and beliefs Than to re-examine them and see if they are no longer serving us I talked about how to do that in chapter 6 chapter 7 is all about performance And so this is how you can slowly degrade your performance with comfortable things like alcohol I’m not getting enough sleep trying to pretend to be a hard charger when really all you’re doing is detrimental things to your performance and how Every little small decision you make affects your performance which affects how you’re able to attack being uncomfortable Number chapter 8 is about the mind So this is the biggest thing the power of the mind like I talk about this all the time you have to be focusing on This in some way shape or form how powerful your mind is and it talks about how us not focusing on that Cost us a great deal, and when you do focus on it.

sneaky comfort, prosperity, and limiting ideas

You can see a lot more success chapter 9 is on leadership Really self leadership. I’m not trying to write an entire leadership book here That’s not that wasn’t the goal of when I wrote this but one of the biggest things that you can do is Lead yourself and a question. I ask people all the time is Would you follow you?

Answer that question would you follow you so if you are who you are and you want someone to come work for you? Would you follow you right now if the answer is no you’ve got a lot of work to do if you would follow you That’s awesome, but I talked about how to attack self-leadership there, so it doesn’t cost you a great deal now We’re moving on to part two.

I call the truth, and it’s a process.

I call aviate navigate communicate so big picture Have an aviation background don’t need to get into that right now, but the aviate navigate communicate is a very simple You know phrase they use in the aviation world and it’s kind of a triage an order of operations When you’re flying the airplane so the first thing aviate is just fly the damn airplane You just need to fly the airplane like it doesn’t matter if you’re an emergency situation The first thing you need to do is just fly the damn airplane make sure everything’s stable good to go We’re flying the airplane then after you are flying the airplane, and you feel good You’re doing it you can navigate when you navigate you’re trying to find out where do I want to go?

the power of the mind and self-leadership

I’m here I need to get here, so what do I do well? How do I get there?

How do I get to this next point and then communicate is now?

part 2 , aviate. navigate. communicate. (ch. 10 to 12)

I’m gonna start talking to the tower I’m gonna start talking to other aircraft I’m gonna do all these things aviate navigate communicate in that order, and I talked about a very you know stark Contrast like a like a kind of a bad example of an actual Aircraft and they had the black wax recording But the plane crashed and the reason the plane crashed even though they had multiple Successful pilots on board is because they weren’t aviate navigate communicate.

They were trying to communicate They’re trying to find out where they were going and then they realized that no one was actually flying the airplane and it crashed sounds Unbelievable, but that actually happened. I believe it was in the 1970s and They use that example all the time to teach young pilots. Hey you need to a Aviate navigate communicate, so how does this apply to a person trying to get more uncomfortable killing comfort well?

There’s an order of operations to you Becoming a person who can chase hard things the first one is aviate. It’s just focusing on daily small habits We don’t need to set some big 10-year vision or grand mission or any of that stuff if you kind of suck at getting You know stringing two days in a row of a habit right like we don’t need to be talking about all of that kind of Stuff we just need to be getting you better at habit. You know implementation. That’s the aviate the navigate is like okay I’m good. I’m building some steam momentum. What do I do? How do I navigate well?

what that means for your habits and strategy

how you navigate is you start to actually map out a plan you have you know a Quarterly goal an annual goal five-year goal all of those kind of things. That’s the navigation phase So it goes from how do I get better at my day-to-day? How do I start planning out bigger picture things and then communicate is helping others in the process?

So it’s communicating with other coaches who can help you and then also helping other people because once you actually get to that process And you’re able to communicate Then it’s like light speed especially if you’re hiring mentors And I also believe when you’re teaching other people how to do things like I am in a lot of my content It forces me to get better at the concept itself So that is part two chapters 10 11 and 12 88 navigate communicate I talked about everything in detail from how to get better at the day-to-day tasks how to plan out and then what to do in a communication phase Now part three is called results.

It’s the 86% process. It’s like what is the process now?

part 3 , the 86% process (ch. 13 to 18)

What is the killing comfort lifestyle look like and chapter 13 is about balance? It’s about the core elements you need as a human being from sleep to vitamin D Nutrition all these things that you need to be checking off to optimize that performance if you go back to part one I was talking about how your lack of optimizing your performance is costing you a great deal talk about how to optimize that Chapter 14 is called focus.

It’s how to focus how to do deep work how to get into the weeds of what you’re doing Become better at it 15 is grit is how to actually build grit how to build mental toughness And I’ve helped a lot of people do this and we have a very simple practice of doing really hard workouts occasionally That’s something I like to do to maintain that grit habit, but there are a lot of other ways to accomplish that’s chapter 15 Chapter 16 I talked about the essential habits things like hormesis Constantly pushing yourself doing you know?

Heat exposure cold exposure things like that when they are necessary when they are a good habits These essential habits that keep you on this point of always being slightly uncomfortable in your day-to-day life Chapter 17 some of the biggest mistakes people have as they go through this process One major one being like complaining all the time even though you’re doing all these hard things like if you’re doing hard things you’re killing comfort You’re becoming better, but you’re complaining about the work that you’re doing to do it.

balance, focus, grit, essential habits, and final warnings

You’re complaining your complaint That’s just one of the big mistakes that you can make along this Path is just complaining about everything amongst many others.

That’s chapter 17 and then chapter 18 I talked about how comfort is the enemy it’s going to try and sneak in Every place that it can you’re gonna get complacent here and there, but the goal is to always stay on point Continually assess yourself and see where you might be getting comfortable So you can make those changes and that pretty much rounds out the book killing comfort So if you want to copy and get an Amazon you go to killing comfort comm or you can sign up for the newsletter Again somewhere around here in the description You can download the first chapter if you want to read through kind of get a picture for some of those historical examples But if you want to be more successful, do not chase comfort.

Do not chase easy. You have to chase hard