if you don't kill comfort, comfort will kill you

Summary

if you don’t kill comfort, comfort will kill you. I wrote that line in Killing Comfort in 2020 and I sign off every Garage Gym Athlete podcast with it. not as a tagline. as a reminder that this is something you do continually, not something you complete.

1. every new rung of success introduces new pacifiers. you don’t beat comfort, you just keep moving the line. I wish that was different. it isn’t.

2. pacifiers serve no purpose. you give a baby one because it soothes and shuts the baby up. adults are now drowning in them. phones, feeds, on demand everything. and the scariest part is most people won’t notice until they’re on a deathbed.

3. there’s a chapter of the book you should be writing today that will never get written because you scrolled Instagram. there’s a poem you would have imagined that never happens because of YouTube. nothing about the platforms looks evil from inside. they’re optimized for engagement. that’s the design.

4. comfort kills the obvious way physically through heart disease, cancer, inactivity, overnourishment. it also kills careers, relationships, spiritual lives, and creative output in less obvious ways because the pacifier soothes away the discomfort that would have pushed you forward.

5. start small. go grab the book if you don’t have it, you’ll put zero dollars in my pocket because it’s listed at the lowest price Amazon will let me. just read it. pick one habit. start killing comfort today. if that sounds like too much, try harder.

Transcript

there is no finality to it

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe, if you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. If you don’t kill comfort, comfort will kill you. I first wrote that in my book, Killing Comfort, which was published in 2020, just two short months after the pandemic kicked off. And I say at the end of every Garage Gym Athlete podcast that I sign off on, if you don’t kill comfort, comfort will kill you.

And I’m not trying to have some tagline that people can remember me by, I’m actually trying to remind every human being who thinks I’m worthy of a listen, that you have to go out there and proactively kill comfort, and there is no finality to it. There’s no being done. It’s not kill comfort and be done, it’s killing comfort.

You’re always going to have to be doing this. And I’m sorry, I wish it was different, but it’s not. You have to continually kill comfort. In every new rung of success that you achieve is just an introduction to new pacifiers in your life that are going to make you super complacent, and you’re going to find yourself in the exact same position you were, where you’re just having to kill comfort, but it’s in new areas.

pacifiers in adult life

So I want to talk about killing comfort a little bit today, because every time I feel like the world might be moving in the right direction, I just run into a lot of different situations and instances where that’s not the case, and it has me genuinely concerned. I wish that I could sit around and just talk about my book, Killing Comfort, over and over again, and that’s all this podcast would be about.

Maybe that’s what I revert to at some point. And that’s not some egotistical thing, because I wrote the book. Look, if you go to Amazon.com right now and you find Killing Comfort, I have it listed the least amount that I can list Killing Comfort, because Amazon still has to print and ship a physical copy of this book to you.

I have it listed the least amount that I can, because I don’t actually care about the income from the book. I make money in other ways. I want people to read and implement the book. I want you to go kill comfort. And so the biggest thing that’s been on my mind lately with, if you don’t kill comfort, comfort will kill you, is the concept that I bring up and I mentioned just a few moments ago are pacifiers.

So a pacifier serves no real purpose, all right? We all know what a pacifier is. You give a baby a pacifier basically so the baby will shut up. It’s soothing and it gives them something to do and it makes them be quiet, right? I’m sure someone can argue that there’s something different, maybe there’s some tiny benefit from it, but ultimately that’s all it’s really there for.

the chapter you’ll never write

The human baby survived for a long time without pacifiers. And now human adults are inundated with pacifiers. And the alarming thing to me is that I don’t think anyone’s going to realize it until they’re on their deathbed. There’s a chapter of the book that you should be writing today that will never be written because you’re scrolling Instagram.

There’s a poem that you could have written or imagined or thought of that will never happen because you’re watching YouTube videos. You get what’s happening with these pacifiers. They seem so harmless and a lot of it is technology related. I don’t think that there’s some big master plan conspiracy here.

I feel like speed of technology and entrepreneurship is ever increasing. We’ve become the product in all of these consumption categories, whether that’s video, audio, social media, all these things. We’ve become the product, so we need to become addicted to these things. And so that’s what’s happened and it’s compounded so fast.

We have ourselves in a pretty bad situation. But there are a lot of things not happening. There are a lot of things that you are not doing, and I’ll say this about myself as well, that I’m probably not doing because of pacifiers in our life. If you don’t do something about it, you’re probably going to be just fine, okay?

comfort kills slowly

So I’m not going alarmist, end of the world here. I’m saying if you don’t kill comfort and you do have all these pacifiers, you’ll probably just, you’ll be just okay, you’ll be fine, you’ll be average. But what that’s removing, what parts that’s killing of you that you’re completely unaware of, the creativity that you could have, the things that you could be doing, the things that you could be learning, they’re getting squashed and they’re getting squandered every day.

And if you want to be something greater than average, you’re going to have to kill comfort. It will kill us and it kills us slowly. In the physical sense, that’s 100% true. If you don’t kill comfort, it absolutely will kill you through heart disease, cancer, anything else that happens from inactivity and overnourishment.

That’s a very obvious one, but the not-so-obvious ones are where we could be in our careers, in our spiritual lives, in our relationships if we didn’t have these pacifiers trying to soothe away the things that we are unwilling to face, do, be, or try harder at. And that’s all I have for you today. Just a reminder, go pick up my book if you haven’t.

You will be putting absolutely zero dollars in my pocket. I just want you to listen to the book on Audible or I want you to read the book if you haven’t. Start to implement something, start small, start killing comfort today. I’ve seen way too much of this lately and it’s making me sick. Don’t be a part of this generation that’s going to be lost with pacifiers, with the squandering of time and potential.

start small today

I think the potential is what makes me the most frustrated because if you have nothing to offer this world, great, go sit on your phone for six hours a day, I don’t care. But that’s not the people I work with. The people I work with are pretty badass. Everyone I encounter and interview, they’re badasses.

And so when I see people like that squandering their time and potential, it’s upsetting because that potential could be used in such a greater way, not only for themselves and for their families but for their surrounding communities and for people that they could impact. Don’t let that be you. If you don’t kill comfort, comfort will kill you.

Try harder.