The Comfort Zone is supposed to keep your life safe, but what it really does is keep your life small.
A few rare individuals refuse to live limited lives. They drive through tremendous amounts of pain—from rejections and failures to shorter moments of embarrassment and anxiety. They also handle the small, tedious pain required for personal discipline, forcing themselves to do things we all know we should do but don’t—like exercising, eating right, and staying organized. Because they avoid nothing, they can pursue their highest aspirations. They seem more alive than the rest of us. They have something that gives them the strength to endure pain—a sense of purpose. A sense of purpose doesn’t come from thinking about it. It comes from taking action that moves you toward the future. The moment you do this, you activate a force more powerful than the desire to avoid pain. We call this the “Force of Forward Motion. To tap into this force, you need to move relentlessly forward in your own life—only then have you taken on its form. He talked about the subject closest to his heart—football. He was first team All-City, considered the best running back in the area. For whatever reason, he was eager to explain to me how he’d achieved this distinction. What he said shocked me—I can still remember it forty years later. He explained that he wasn’t the fastest back in the city, nor was he the most elusive. There were stronger players, too. But he was still the best in the city, with big-time scholarship offers to prove it. The reason he was the best, he explained, had nothing to do with his physical abilities—it was his attitude about getting hit. He’d demand the ball on the first play from scrimmage and would run at the nearest tackler. He wouldn’t try to fake him out or run out of bounds. He’d run right at him and get hit on purpose, no matter how much it hurt. “When I get up, I feel great, alive. That’s why I’m the best. The other runners are afraid, you can see it in their eyes.” He was right; none of them shared his desire to get crushed by a defender. My first reaction was that he was mad. He lived in a world of constant pain and danger—and he liked it. It was exactly the world I’d spent my young life avoiding. But I couldn’t get his crazy idea out of my mind; if you go right for the pain, you develop superpowers. The more the years went by, the more I found this to be true—and not just in sports. The Tools: 5 Tools to Help You Find Courage, Creativity, and Willpower--and Inspire You to Live Life in Forward Motion Comments are closed.
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