Comfort Zone=Dead Zone
"Better the bad known than the good to be known"
Never before was said greater nonsense .
Practical example, to settle for an average job, what does this mean for a person?
Average person- "Well, I've been in an average job for years, a place where I feel exploited and receiving a salary that is barely enough to get to the end of the month, but at least it's better than nothing."
Yes, it's better than nothing, but why to even make that comparision? Try to compare it with something a little bit better than nothing and you will maybe think twice certain things. Maybe ... but that is to face: "The good to know" ... scary right?
Let's evaluate the costs of your mediocre job:
- Loss of your most valuable resource, time (possibly your best years)
- The best thing in life is learning. Learning=Growing and subsequently, Not Learning=Dying. As an employee you rarely get stimulated in that field, perhaps some courses, but never to be self-taught.
- It may deprives you of being with the people you most love
- It does not give you possibilities of economic expansion. The expenses will grow and the financial pressure will drown you.
- The previous points leads you to a miserable life. Your family will lack resources. You will not have vacations or anything that smells like quality. Your children will not have a proper education and will end up in an average job repeating the cycle.
What is the worst case scenario that could happen to you if you aspire to something else? Missing your target. And in that case you'd always have your mediocre job waiting for you.
Thinking big
What if I looked for that "good to know? and what if I succeed?
We all have that dreamer inside of us, that inspiration of yourself triumphing. Ah, but 99% of the time you will hear that little voice saying: Stop dreaming watermelon head!
Sorry I didn't find it in English. A bit of humor;)
Your mind is not programmed for success
That voice is your mind. Your mind is a survival mechanism. Its mission is to keep you alive, not to make you succeed. (Tony Robbins, Power without Limits, or basically anyone who have achieved some kind of success will tell you)
Your mind will paralyze you every time you face any uncomfortable or unknown situation. It will keep you in your comfort zone, in what have always been planned for you.
However, the brain needs new experiences to develop, to grow (Supercerebro, Deepak Chopra). Travel, meet new people, learn new skills, sports, languages, read, undertake new projects, establish new relationships.
Otherwise it will become lazy and will rationalize such lazyness by means of an internal mechanism called Reticular Activator System (to which I will devote an article apart)
I do not want to extend these articles too much, so my next entry will be dedicated to specific techniques to end the comfort zone and start doing what we really want, without limiting ourselves to an increasingly narrow strip of reality.
()
But to warm up, a tip and a book:
-Do something everyday that you are not comfortable at all doing
Feel the fear and do it anyway, by Susan Jeffers
Thanks for reading, I promise to publish soon a compilation of ways to leave the comfort zone. Your life will improve massively, and faster than you could ever begin to imagine ;)
What if our greatest evil on the planet is good people going to work doing jobs they have no passion for? Thank you for looking into this here in your post!
30-40 years of a passionless job? Sounds scary, doesn't it? You're welcome @jerrybanfield, glad you like it :)
I used to like my job a lot. But over the past few years the management has made many disastrous decisions and arbitrary changes that have made my office a downright miserable place to work. And of course when their Grand schemes eventually backfire and we move on to the next hair brained idea of theirs, they blame the people under them for their own mistakes in the form of our annual appraisals.
I've wanted to get out of this job or at least this department for about a year now and it seems like every time I come across some opportunity to leave my brain comes up with so many reasons why i should stay put which means continuing to be miserable 5 days a week 8-10 hours per day.
There's definitely a lot of truth to what you've said about the mind trying to keep a person in their comfort zone and preventing a person from achieving real success. It's something I struggle with daily.
All you need is a really powerful why and a good plan. I don't know if you have written Awaken the Giant Within, but it definitely helped me to change my life and took it to the next level ^^
The Hell we know is better than the one we don't . That's been said and will be again .