“Success is the Continuous mastery over challenges”

–Life Signatures.

The secret is not waiting for the discomfort to come your way…the secret is to actually put the discomfort and the pressure on yourself! This is the smartest way to balance between being under pressure and being comfortable. Why? Because you tend to decide when and why you can have some fun.

It is possible that the time and money being expended on my comfort today could be forfeited so that I can have a better tomorrow. One of the corollaries of Parkinson’s Law states to the effect that “to the degree we have an increase in a resource, to that degree we will expand our consumption of the same resource”.

The point is that before the expansion, we were doing quite well. With the expansion, we now see an opportunity for comfort.

It is a paradox. The more comfortable you are now, the less you are growing. The less you grow, the less you are fruitful and profitable. But we all want comfort don’t we? We would all want a relaxed cozy life devoid of pressure and stress, right?

The more progressive of us would answer an emphatic “No!”

“The more time you spend in your discomfort zone, the more your comfort Zone will expand” ~ Robin Sharma

Coming Alive

This is because they realize just how helpful discomfort is. To them, the more they put their souls out there in pursuit of a particular goal, the more progressive and fruitful they become. [ictt-tweet-inline]Progressive people know that discomfort brings the best out of them, making them come alive.[/ictt-tweet-inline]

Of course someone will tell me that “those who are doing what they love do not work at all and therefore they don’t have any pressure”. That statement is easy to say, but in reality, whether you are smack in the middle of your life purpose or not, [ictt-tweet-inline]discomfort and pressure would be your greatest friends in achieving what you desire.[/ictt-tweet-inline]

The secret is not waiting for the discomfort to come your way…the secret is to actually put the discomfort and the pressure on yourself! This is the smartest way to balance between being under pressure and being comfortable. Why? Because you tend to decide when and why you can have some fun.

This is not to say that trouble might not come your way uninvited. That would be naive. [ictt-tweet-inline]Life is structured in such a way that the unexpected happens even to the most prepared[/ictt-tweet-inline]…but the most prepared will better handle the unexpected…but I digress.

The following are the reasons why you need to cherish some discomfort daily in your life. The more pressure you put on yourself to achieve something, the more alive and fruitful you become.

1. It helps you ask the right questions:

[ictt-tweet-inline]Pressure squeezes out the dross and elevates a life to seek the most important things[/ictt-tweet-inline] in life. Questions like “Why was I born?” are mostly asked when pressure backs you against the wall and deprives you of life’s options. [ictt-tweet-inline]In life, questions are answers. It is therefore important to ask the right questions.[/ictt-tweet-inline]

2. It helps you live a basic life:

Nothing cuts costs and forces us to stick on a budget like financial pressure does. In fact, On the subject of finances, [ictt-tweet-inline]Financial pressure is a good thing for it will enforce financial discipline[/ictt-tweet-inline]. It becomes easy to live life within your means. A good thing is that if this pressure is used in the right way, one can formulate an internal system in their psyche that will leverage every financial increase and windfall that comes your way.

3. It helps you focus for the future:

[ictt-tweet-inline]Today’s pressure and discomfort will cause you to make better decisions for the future[/ictt-tweet-inline] that you would have otherwise not made. For example, if your $ 2500 monthly budget is suddenly cut to $1500, that is pressure. You will have to re-structure your expenditure in such a way that it will fit the new and smaller budget. If per chance the budget is restored to $2500 once again, you realize that you have two options: Either to continue operating at $1500 kind of a lifestyle or to ‘upgrade’ to $2500 kind of a lifestyle. Without the pressure, chances are that your focus might have just been on your present and not your future.

4. It activates the searcher in you:

I will insist: Everybody has a purpose in life. [ictt-tweet-inline]When you are in discomfort, the searcher in you for your “why” is activated more[/ictt-tweet-inline] than at any other juncture in your life. In fact, I dare say that one of the biggest benefits of pressure, stress, trouble and crisis in your life is to help you gravitate towards your life purpose.

So anytime pressure comes your way, it is time to either continue the search for your purpose, or to re-focus and re-align it.

5. It helps you focus on what really matters:

 I have written about “what really matters” previously. Honestly, if a good number of earth’s population focused daily an what really matters, there would be so much growth and fruitfulness on earth.

Very many people are spending lots of time and money doing the non-essential. This is one of the side-effects of being comfortable for too long. [ictt-tweet-inline]Nothing knows how to ‘persuade’ us to seek out what is important, critical and essential like pressure does.[/ictt-tweet-inline] Comfort would not do that for you. [ictt-tweet-inline]Comfort sometimes is like dope, numbing our senses towards the essential things of life[/ictt-tweet-inline] as well as the future.

Personally, I have had growth in leaps and bounds in my life coming directly from instances of tremendous pressure. [ictt-tweet-inline]I am learning in my latter years to put the pressure on myself in order to accelerate growth and fruitfulness[/ictt-tweet-inline] in my life.

Makes sense?