Читать книгу It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work - Jason Fried, Jason Fried - Страница 9

The idea that you have to constantly push yourself out of your comfort zone is the kind of supposedly self-evident nonsense you’ll often find in corporate manifestos. That unless you’re uncomfortable with what you’re doing, you’re not trying hard enough, not pushing hard enough. What?

Requiring discomfort—or pain—to make progress is faulty logic. NO PAIN, NO GAIN! looks good on a poster at the gym, but work and working out aren’t the same. And, frankly, you don’t need to hurt yourself to get healthier, either.

Sure, sometimes we stand at the threshold of a breakthrough, and taking the last few steps can be temporarily uncomfortable or, yes, even painful. But this is the exception, not the rule.

Generally speaking, the notion of having to break out of something to reach the next level doesn’t jibe with us. Oftentimes it’s not breaking out, but diving in, digging deeper, staying in your rabbit hole that brings the biggest gains. Depth, not breadth, is where mastery is often found.

Most of the time, if you’re uncomfortable with something, it’s because it isn’t right. Discomfort is the human response to a questionable or bad situation, whether that’s working long hours with no end in sight, exaggerating your business numbers to impress investors, or selling intimate user data to advertisers. If you get into the habit of suppressing all discomfort, you’re going to lose yourself, your manners, and your morals.

On the contrary, if you listen to your discomfort and back off from what’s causing it, you’re more likely to find the right path. We’ve been in that place many times over the years at Basecamp.

It was the discomfort of knowing two people doing the same work at the same level were being paid differently that led us to reform how we set salaries. That’s how we ended up throwing out individual negotiations and differences in pay, and going with a simpler system.

It was how uncomfortable it felt working for other people at companies that had taken large amounts of venture capital that kept us on the path of profitable independence at Basecamp.

Being comfortable in your zone is essential to being calm.