The Biggest Reason People Fail At Life: Staying In The Comfort Zone

[TJ Reeves]

I've been practicing how to write for the past few months so that I can properly explain my ideas. This is a small sample.  

1977 - a 28 year old Arnold Schwarzenegger sits in front of his interviewer, body sprawled on the chair, legs wide open. It’s only a few days until his final Mr. Olympia contest, where he’ll face off against the bodybuilding champions from the world to see who’s the best of the best. The interviewer asks Arnold why he loves lifting so much.

Arnold clears his throat. (Note: You really have to read this in Arnold’s voice) “The greatest feeling you can get in a gym, or the most satisfying feeling you can get in a gym, is the pump.”

The Interviewer leans in to understand. The pump?

“Let's say you trained your biceps: blood is rushing into your muscle, and that would be called a pump. Your muscles get this really tight feeling, like your skin is going to explode any minute. It’s like you blew air into your muscles and it feels different, it feels fantastic.”

If you’ve ever attempted to run, swim, or lift weights at maximum effort, you’ve felt the pump. It’s what comes immediately after feeling “the burn.” For most people, this feeling is a “bad thing” that tells you that you were barely able to complete your exercise – a sign of weakness. For Arnold, this just isn’t the case at all. “It's as satisfying to me as cumming is, as having sex with a woman and cumming.”

He continues, “so can you believe how much I am in heaven? I'm getting the feeling of cumming in a gym, I'm getting the feeling of cumming at home, I am, like, getting the feeling, feeling of cumming backstage.” The interviewer, understandably, is in taken aback. What the hell is wrong with this guy?

“When I pump up, when I pose out in front of 5,000 people, I get the same feeling. So I am cumming day and night! It's terrific, right? I am in heaven.”

If there was any one key idea for personal development it would be this: Do the emotionally difficult things.

Adventure only happens when you step outside the safety of your nest. Growth only happens when you push your body, heart, and mind to its limit. New inventions only come from the edge knowledge. You know it already: you want to go out there.

Conflict comes from the fact that saving energy is the key to life.  We are animals living in a universe where energetic decay is the law. For billions of years, the animals that could to take shortcuts did so, ultimately beating out their competitors in the evolutionary arms race. The name of the game is survival of the laziest not strongest. As such, evolutionary editing has pushed us to not leave our comfort zone, even if part of us wants to.

In a time when humans have their basic needs met, the comfort zone is harder to leave than ever. Why the fuck do anything when you have food, water, shelter, a partner to snuggle up to while watching Reality TV, a Facebook account to boost your self esteem with custom-tailored likes, and Videogames to scratch the itch for self-actualization through arbitrary ‘achievement points’ that subjectively feel no different from an Olympic medal or a job promotion?

Moreover, we work long, boring jobs that drain our mental energy for little to no pay off. In particular, economic globalization makes it such that more stuff gets produced for the same amount of pay – and yet we can’t complain because there’s always some one available to take our jobs. In fact, if we do complain, we’re seen as entitled pussies or unappreciative dicks. Dude, there’s people out in like, Wakanda – you know, where the Black Panther is from - going through shit and you’re complaining that you want more? What’s wrong with you?

We come home tired after a long day, only to find bogus, disconfirmed, unsupported pop-psychology articles that claim will power is a muscle that drains itself after even the smallest of disciplined decisions. We’re told that even something as small as choosing to eat carrots sticks instead of cupcakes will ruin the entirety of our decision making for the rest of the day. We’re then told that the only way to prevent this is to build up our willpower muscle. And since we’ve worked once or twice out in the past and we know how painful the pump was, we then conclude that training our willpower must be just as painful as well.

We’re also scared of the unknown. Evolution nurtured the animals that found their niche, but it only did so by ruthlessly killing off the ones who found the wrong niche. And you don’t know which niche you’re in until its too late, really. As such, we’re scared of failure; We’re scared of embarrassment – an internal sign tribe will leave us for dead; and in general, we’re scared of the potential of death.

And the Kosmic joke about enlightenment is that we’re specifically going on an adventure toward our own death! Who’s crazy enough to do that? For what? Nothing! Are you kidding me? No! What a joke! 

But lets say we do leave the comfort zone. Then we have to consider our tendency to overreact to our fear of the unknown and rush things. We listen to Tony Robbins tapes on repeat, puff up our chests, take advantage of adrenaline, and shoot ourselves into the unknown, thinking there’s no other option.

We quit our job without lining up other offers. We break-up with our lovers instead of trying couples counseling. We sign up for a 2-year gym membership in full and end up going for 2-weeks. We tell everyone about the new ‘startup’ we created, only to have that startup fold within 6 months.

The worst part is that when friends and family tell us that what we’re doing is not exactly the best idea, we tell them to fuck off because we think we’re the real heroes – they’re just side kicks; we’re the ones who stepped out of the comfort zone, they have yet to wake the fuck up and see the adventure waiting for them out there.

Even if we do manage to bob along in the deep dark ocean for a little bit, we get tired after a while and start to sink. It took us years to climb up the career ladder, so we justify buying an audacious sports car, only to crash it months later. Or maybe we spent 5 years trying to lose weight, so on the day that we hit our target weight we begin to binge eat. Fun fact: 80% of The Biggest Loser contestants go back to weighing the same they did at the beginning of the show, regardless of how many hundreds of pounds they managed to shed. Lets call this the Upper Limit Problem – we self-sabotage or otherwise handicap our success to return to a state of comfy equilibrium.

The point is that we get ourselves way over our head, one way or another. Then We kick. We scream. We begin to drown.

Our best hope that point is to have friends and family – the same ones you told to fuck off earlier – magically appear to transport us to the little comfort cubby that we spent so much energy leaving. We sulk in our cubbies, bruised, heart-broken, and ashamed. We develop learned helplessness – we start to think that trying at all is a joke. And we’re embarrassed to ever go after anything again because we figure our friends aren’t going to save us a second (3rd? 13th? 50th?) time – Death is real at that point.

We’re left so traumatized that we now think there’s no choice but to plug back into the matrix. As once said in The Big Lebowski, “Fuck it dude, let’s go bowling.”

Fuck it dude, let’s stay with this safe job that pays nothing. Fuck it dude, I don’t care if he treats me like shit, at least he pays me attention. Fuck it dude, let’s get wasted this weekend - “it’s the times you won’t remember with the friends you won’t forget”, right? 

In our daze, we turn on the TV to see fuckers like Arnold Schwarzenegger gyrating in a speedo on stage. There are fuckers in this world who seem to love leaving their comfort zone and do so with absolutely no problem. They’re almost inhuman. They love reminding us of that fact. And even if they don’t actually like reminding us of this fact, then in the weirdest twist of mental irony, the more they talk about their regular human problems, the more inhuman they become. (See: Emma Watson, Jennifer Lawrence, Bill Murray, and Siddartha Gautama for examples of cults of personality based on people who specifically try not to create cults of personality by admitting they’re human).

We watch in awe of these ‘demigods’ while we heal our bruised, broken, ashamed egos from earlier. Let's be honest, that’s really what the 'matrix' is – a place to watch those fuckers be themselves – total fuckers - and fuck us while we heal ourselves within the comfort zone. Schwarzeneggar, Ferriss, Robbins, Trump, Jobs - The name changes but the process doesn’t. They all sit there on stage showing off their latest product – themselves, ultimately - and gloating while they cum in our face.

Fuck that, dude.

Specifically, Fuck saying ‘Fuck it.’ Stop getting so much cum in your eyes from those fuckers on stage – it’s clouding your vision. Life doesn’t have to be so black and white. We can leave our comfort zone without drowning. The whole conflict with our energy - most of it is an illusion. The truth is that as we start doing stuff, we’ll naturally compensate by getting stronger and using a smaller proportion of our energy. That’s the whole point of growth.

Our plan is the following: we focus on growing ourselves about 4% total every day ideally. Potentially, we’re talking about 1% growth intellectually + 1% growth physically + 1% growth spiritually + 1% growth in career or relationships. Or, it doesn’t even have to be all at the same time: perhaps its better to shift the ratio so that you grow certain aspects more than others. In that case, we want to coast on certain aspects of life and focus on 4% daily growth on the subject of spirit or mind or career or relationships. The point is we don’t do too much, but we definitely don’t do too little. Overtime, we develop compound growth such that after adding a few percentage points everyday for 365 days, we've become completely different people. Huge growth, no stretch-marks.                                          

The hardest part isn’t starting, it’s maintaining right after the start and through the middle. This is the case for basically anything worthwhile in life. Here is the entirety of life’s quests: you start with a lot of emotional momentum, then you hit a huge wall of boredom and plateau, but then you break past that wall and it gets easier… until you once again plateau, at which point you must repeat the process. Arnold Schwarzeneggar knows this and plans accordingly. After a while, he gets to that point where maintenance is easy – the pump feels good – then he leaves to start another project or continue growth. This is how he became a millionaire before becoming a movie star.  

So then the question becomes, how do we plan to break through that wall? Well, Cliffhangers give stories momentum, so we’ll answer that later. We want to first talk about the other two problems we have to WOOP – distractions and conditions-for-happiness.

Edited August 5, 2017 by TJ Reeves