Why Comfort Is the Real Enemy | Ep. 363

If it feels uncomfortable, it's probably not your intuition, it is your avoidance. And I used to think that my gut was smart, and it turned out that most of the time my gut wanted to do the most comfortable thing possible. And that didn't mean it was the thing that was aligned with my values, didn't mean it was a thing that was going to get me towards my goals, didn't mean it was a thing that was going to make me have the best life. It just meant it was like the thing that felt the best in the moment. So I'll give you a good example. I will look at my calendar with my commitments, and I will feel anxious. Now why is that? Because I'll have a lot of high stakes things in a period of seven days. And I'll look at it in my brain. We'll be like, "Oh my gosh, we should change something." This feel, it doesn't feel good, it feels uncomfortable when I'm looking at it, feels uncomfortable thinking about it, feels like all these things. And it's weird because I could have just planned that a week ago, but all of a sudden the day before it's happening, it's suddenly I'm starting to feel like I should change something about this. And this happens all the time, what I've realized is because I'm raising my capacity ceiling. I'm actually accomplishing the things that I want to accomplish. It's just that they don't always feel amazing in the moment. So something I've been very good at is those harder things on my calendar. Those are the things that are the most non-negotiable to move. If I wanted to keep ruining my life, this is exactly how I would do it. I would feel bored or it feel anxious. I would change the strategy or I would assume it's the wrong move. I would feel uninspired, and I would blow up my plan. And I would give my mood a seat at the table when making decisions and moves that could get me to my 10-year goals. When you let your emotions and your mood guide just strategy, you optimize for feeling good today instead of getting the results you want tomorrow. And so remember like boredom, anxiety, frustration, anger, those are usually the price we have to pay for the success we want. And discomfort means that we're growing. And so you don't want to confuse these signals. Like we have this stigma that if it feels bad, it is bad, but a lot of times if it feels bad, it's healthy. Number six is outsourced your belief. Validation is overrated. Most great ideas start their life getting laughed at out the room. Early on when I would have ideas in my company, I would like test ideas in the room to see if people got excited. And if they didn't get excited at my idea, I would literally just like kill the idea. I was like, "F*** it, nobody likes it, no he's excited about it." What I was doing is I was actually abdicating my own judgment to people who didn't have the context I had. And so most breakthrough ideas, as far as I realize, most of them sound stupid at first. Most of the best things I have done did not start with somebody supporting me. About two years ago in my business, I went to my team and I said, "I think that, based on what we're at right now, the demand we have for the business, everything we're doing, I think the next thing that makes sense for us to do is to do some sort of in-person events with people that want to engage with acquisition.com." And when I went to my team and I said this, I would say that about 60% of people disagreed with me and 40% of people agreed with me. And I remember in that moment, recognizing and coming to that room, knowing that I needed to be ready for this, because I didn't think everyone was going to agree with me. And the hardest process, or the hardest part about getting this off the ground was not the logistics of it, it wasn't anything. It was knowing that there's a certain amount of people that they're not going to believe it till they see it. And that my job as the leader, with more context and understanding and stake in the business than anybody, is to make the best decisions for the business. And so in that moment, I had to say, I understand that like 60% of my people don't think this is like the best idea and think it sounds like a little far from left field. But I also know this was part of my vision of what I saw when I started this four years ago. And it feels out of left field because I haven't talked about it since then because we've been busy doing this other thing. And so I said, you know what? It's reasonable. The other people wouldn't applaud this idea. If I had the same context they had, I probably wouldn't either. And so I said, cool, I understand. We're going to disagree and commit to doing it with me anyways. And the team did. And it ended up being a huge success. So it ended up being even better than I thought it could have been. But nobody thought that one presented it. So if I wanted to keep ruining my life, this is exactly how I would do it. I would post the idea, wait for comments from people, let that determine if I was going to build it. I would essentially pitch the vision, read the room, edit based on who looked bored and who looked like they didn't like it. So when you outsource your decision to other people's reactions, you essentially are giving veto power to people who do not even have your vision or context. So what happens is you get like a water down strategy. It keeps you away from some of the biggest bets you could make. And you end up being unable to build anything that people don't already understand. If you want to do something that nobody's ever done, do you think anybody's going to understand? You have to trust your own judgment sometimes. External validation is data. It doesn't mean that it makes the decision. And I think most of the time the best moves look kind of crazy until they actually work. Number seven, optimize for feeling productive. Busy is not the same as effective. Exhaustion is not evidence of value. I used to wear my full calendar, like booked from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. like it was a badge of honor. Then I realized that I was solving everybody else's problems to avoid maybe like two hard decisions that I could make myself. What I did is I looked at my calendar and I said, what on here is a reaction to somebody else's problems rather than proactively solving my own and solving the ones that I know I need to work on. And that changed so much of how I looked at my time. Because what I realized is that there was a lot that I was doing to help avoid decisions that I needed to make of like there were people that I looked at and I was like they added five hours to my calendar each week for the last month. Oh, that's because they can't actually do their job. And I've avoided the decision of finding somebody to be their boss. And so I realized that I was letting all these things that other people wanted for me to essentially come in and steal my time. And then what it also did is that every time I had like a really hard thing that I had to do that was like truly my responsibility. I was like, oh, well, I have to help them first over here. They really need this. It's important. Which I felt like that before. Like it's really important though. If I don't do it, I'll be a bad friend. I'll be a bad boss. I'll be a bad friend. Like that you need to get your done first. So if I wanted to keep ruining my life, this exactly I would do it. I would just find to every slack message within five minutes. I would take every meeting request, reorganize the Google Drive, recolor code my calendar, and each day f**king exhausted from taking all these calls that I never intended to take from doing other people's job and not closing out any f**king thing that mattered for me. And I would confuse that motion with progress and I would confuse the inputs with outputs. I used to mistake exhaustion for value creation and the cost is that you get incredibly exhausted with f**king nothing to show for it. And your team and everybody around you, because you probably do it with your friends and family too, learn this. You're available for everything. So you also now, congratulations, have become the bottleneck for nothing important at all. Which is a terrible place to be. So instead, what you want to do is protect your attention like it is more valuable than money because it is more valuable than money. You cannot make money without attention. You need to focus on only what you can do and only what you have set out to do and decided that you want to do. The last one, which is keep all options open. Freedom doesn't come from having a dozen doors open. It comes from walking through one with complete conviction and then locking the f**king door behind you. The thing is, I used to actually think that optionality was well, but it's no commitment is because every door is a leak to your attention. See the theme? I'll give you an example of this. Before I met my husband, I had different relationships. I remember like I'm dating somebody, but if I didn't know if I was going to be able to get married to them, I'd be dating them. But it's like there's always this like back door like if somebody else would text me if an ex would come into town. So you're just like, hmm, I don't know. I have options. I remember somebody asked me, they said like what was the biggest difference that you noticed for yourself after you got married. I said the biggest thing I noticed is that I got so much more attention back because all of a sudden I wasn't thinking about like in my with this person forever, who am I going to have kids with? Am I going to settle down? Am I going to get married? Is this the right person for me? It was just like I'm committed. If anybody text me, anybody asked me if the answer is no. The door is closed. I was like, actually, I just got so much time back. I would explore 12 opportunities instead of executing one. And I would treat focus like it was a limitation rather than a force multiplier on achieving my goals and getting what I want in life. You see the thing is when you keep all your options open, you don't go deep enough to compound and even find out if one of the options that you already have is the right option for you. And so you end up with no competitive mode, no expertise in anything, no deep relationships. And your year five looks like a year one. Death beats breath. Mastery comes from commitment, not from exploration. So once you found the thing, you go all in. You have to explore to find it. But once you do, you cut off the exploration. So you pick one thing and you go all in. Now that you know how to ruin 2026 by repeating the same mistakes. Let's flip it completely because there is a reason that some people turn the same 12 months. into very impressive results, while other people leave the same year over and over again.