Overcoming your need for comfort

Wrote something interesting yesterday:

If you can overcome your brain's primal need to seek pleasure and avoid discomfort, there's no limit to what you can achieve because then you can lean away from instant gratification and into the kind of long-term thinking required to generate highly unusual results.

To which a reply came:

That primal need is tough to beat. It's a life long battle...

And he's not wrong.

This isn't a battle that's meant for the faint of heart.

It's meant for the kind of guys who truly, deeply, want and NEED to push to a higher level than what most people accomplish.

But what's interesting is that yes, while it isn't easy to break your escapism loops and push into your discomfort... through ruthless repetition it becomes much easier to subvert that primal need for the sake of growth, until eventually it becomes your default state.

At which point you can't help but win.

Because growth naturally comes from discomfort.

Problem is, the opposite is also true.

When you're habitually chasing cheap, easy dopamine and the temporary comfort it invariably provides, you accidentally undercut your own process, like a plant that's stuck in a pot too small for the stage of growth it's trying to break through... Except you put yourself in that pot unknowingly.

Which is how many guys end up in this place where they've accomplished a lot, but in their comfort-seeking, have plateued and just aren't really growing anymore.

So one of the smartest things you can do is learn what purpose your escapism is serving in your life, find better ways to fulfill that same function, and thereby remove the escapism and massively increase your capacity for discomfort and pushing into whatever it is you need to do to reach the next level — whether that be in business, rekindling your intimacy, fixing your health, or whatever else.

You can't build on a cracked foundation.

Fix the foundation (your neurochemistry and bad habits) and you can truly build whatever you want.

Keep reading these emails and I'll keep nudging you in the right direction.