THE COMFORT ZONE IS A place to rest, not to live.
Doug Grant fell from a scaffold on which he was working and wound up in the hospital temporarily paralyzed from the waist down.
After being in the hospital for a few days, he began to receive visits from nurses and counselors who were trying to help him deal with his situation. Trying to help him cope, psychologically.
“I was getting more and more upset with these people,” he told me during a break at one of my seminars. “They kept asking me to learn to deal with being paralyzed. That was the last thing I wanted. I knew I needed my mind completely focused on what I wanted—to walk again.”
Doug was convinced that if he focused on what he wanted instead of what he didn’t want, he would find a way to get what he wanted.
“I finally had to tell them that the next person they sent in to tell me to ‘deal with’ my paralysis would have an opportunity to deal with their own.”
Doug Grant not only got up and walked again, but he also won a gold medal in the world championships of weightlifting.
“After my accident,” he said, “I made health and fitness my passion and my obsession.”
He had taken over his “tragic” situation. He reinvented himself as an owner. Owners let everything and everyone become their teacher.
You fall, you learn.
Doug Grant was in a seminar of mine again recently, and during a break he came up to remind me of this story, because I had done such an incomplete job of answering one of the seminar attendee’s questions. A young man had asked me the difference between an owner’s and a victim’s thinking when it came to the suffering of genuine pain. Doug Grant knew something about pain.
“If you focus on the pain, and think of nothing but the pain, you will not get anywhere,” Doug pointed out. “You have to accept the pain for what it is, and then focus completely on what you want. The more you focus on what you want, the less the pain matters.”
Owners focus on what they want. Victims focus on what they fear. And both positions are pure internal invention.
In the days after his accident, the nurses and counselors attempted to ease Doug Grant into a comfort zone. We assume, in our society, that comfort is always the ultimate good. We hear phrases during conversations and negotiations such as, “I just want something that we can both be comfortable with,” and both people will take it as an unquestionable given that “comfort” is an ultimate value. But is it?
People look forward to retirement because they imagine great comfort. What they often get is an increase in visits to the doctor, an increase in prescriptions, sometimes an increase in depression, and often an early death. The human system does not really want comfort, it wants challenge. It wants adventure.
And perhaps we can extend that from “the human system” to all living beings.
Stewart Emery reports a startling experiment done with amoebas in California. In his book Actualizations, he reveals how two tanks of amoebas were set up in order to study the conditions most conducive to growing living organisms.
In one tank, the amoebas were given ultimate comfort. The temperature, humidity, water levels, and other conditions were constantly adjusted for ultimate ease in living and proliferation. In the other tank, the amoebas were subjected to rude shocks. They were given rapidly whipsawing changes in fluid level, temperature levels, protein, and every other condition they could think of.
To the total amazement of the researchers, the amoebas in the more difficult conditions grew faster and stronger than those in the comfort zone. They concluded that having things too set and too perfect can cause living things to decay and die, whereas adversity and challenge lead to strength and the building of the life force.
This might also explain why suicide rates in America have always gone down during times of war. And why in Denmark, where a very comfortable government-run lifestyle is guaranteed to everyone, the suicide rate is the highest in the world. There is not much difference between death and the comfort zone. Crossing the line is easy.
The only difference between a rut and a grave is a few feet.