Go Outside your Comfort Zone Right Now

Isaac Taylor

There’s a deluge of advice coming from the most successful. Let’s pick up a few key talking points CEOs and successful entrepreneurs have mentioned this month.

Bill Harrison, who led JPMorgan Chase from 2000 to 2006 told the “How Leaders Lead with David Novak” podcast that he grew when he was thrust out of his comfort zone going from a comfortable San Francisco gig to Europe where he had to oversee 1,300 in a totally new environment. “You’ve got to get people out of their comfort zone. That’s how you keep growing,” he says.
“I don’t want to go to London. I mean, I’m happy in San Francisco … I was very comfortable staying in [my comfort] zone. I was one of the people who didn’t want to keep moving so fast.”

“I look back and say, ‘If I hadn’t done that, I would have missed out on an unbelievable experience”.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai had slightly different advice at a recent commencement speech at Stanford, which tapped directly into human psychology. He summarised it succinctly with “Reward efforts, not outcomes.”

Now this might sound like some Millennial call to action to receive rewards regardless of how good the final result is, and in many ways, yeah, kind of. The result-driven lifestyle though can lead to long-term burnout and is a hell to live through when you’re trying to hit the KPIs. Productivity is going to suffer. But if there can be joy found in the journey of hitting the goal, you’re more likely to persevere and improve over time, reaching that goal with a healthy body and mind. There’s an entire rabbit hole here about socially-prescribed perfectionism versus self-oriented perfectionism. It’s hard to go into all at once but a recent study found that “socially prescribed perfectionism is a maladaptive form of perfectionism associated with extrinsic motivation for studying and higher anxiety in exams. Self-oriented perfectionism, however, is an ambivalent form associated with intrinsic motivation for studying and with both higher and lower anxiety”.

I need more than just a sidebar for this.