Comfort greatest enemy of progress

The threat of irrelevance is real: If your memories of your past are more exciting than your dreams of the future.

Comfort will never let you go freely. You will have to fight for your independence. The greatest threat will come in the area of the greatest comfort.

Comfort is one of the biggest enemies of progress. The ability to create discomfort out of comfort is one that should be coveted by all who want to stay relevant.

Comfort that is not challenged becomes a peak. It becomes a resting place and nowhere is vulnerability magnified as in the resting place.

A person lying down in a position of rest is at greater risk than a person walking. A wild animal lying down and resting after a meal is vulnerable and easier to tackle than one that is in motion and alert.

Comfort that is not challenged becomes a limit. If we do not challenge our comfort, all our decisions will always be decisions that promote our comfort.

We must be aware that comfort can be subtle but wicked leader. It will dictate and direct you and ensure that you always stay within its confines. People who are led by comfort rarely achieve beyond their last level of success.

Comfort blinds the eye to the possibilities of new levels. It deceives the mind into thinking that there can be nothing greater and better than the current state.

It convinces the mind that any attempt to leave the current level for the next will be too demanding and risky.

Comfort is very possessive and will do anything and everything to keep you. Many have given up on great opportunities because the opportunities challenged their comfort.

Many people breathe but are not living. They are slaves of comfort. Comfort denies them growth and growth is a characteristic of living things.

True living happens when we defy comfort and dare it to the face. Comfort will never let you go freely. You will have to fight for your independence.

It is very easy for people to become lethargic especially after a successful programme or product. Once there is room for dwelling on the comfort with no discomfort in sight, it triggers an atmosphere of rest which is in actual fact a disguised atmosphere of vulnerability.

In the classic tale — Who Moved my Cheese by Dr Spencer Johnson, we are told to keep smelling the cheese to know when it is getting old.

With every successful step you take be it the launch of a new product or service or a new business altogether or a new step in your life, if you are not able to create and induce a state of discomfort, the probability of longevity is greatly threatened.

Some things like integrity, honesty, hard work, dedication and loyalty should never change and we should always uphold these no matter where we are and what level we get to and they in turn will continue to work for us.

However, while these things don’t change, the process for executing them will change.

Marshall Goldsmith wrote an outstanding book with an excellent title — What got you here won’t get you there.

How true this is! The dynamics that work for a certain stage of your life will not necessarily work for another stage.

The danger, however, is that when the previous stage was a very successful stage, there is a tendency to just stay there.

Think of life as a school. No matter how well you did in school you did not stay in one class. In fact, before moving from one class to another you had to do an exam.

Dr Akinyemi is chief transformation officer at PowerTalks