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Your comfort zone will kill your passion: Moving into uncharted terrain

Sayings of the Wise

By Innocent Mwangi

We all love to be comfortable. Don’t we?

Comfort conjures in our minds an idyllic life replete with all the trappings of the good life. When we are in our comfort zones, we feel completely secure and are not afraid of challenges – for they don’t exist.

Here at the apex of familiar surroundings, we are the rulers. Everyone and anything bow before us in humble servitude and awe. We want and get what we want without much effort. We can predict what tomorrow portends by just cutting and pasting today.

In our comfort zones, nothing moves, nothing shakes. All is quite and seemingly peaceful. No competition, no challenge, no need to exert ourselves! In a word, everything is ‘cool’, ‘calm’ and ‘collected’ – just the way we like it!

But we all know that life, especially in the business world, is far from being ‘cool’, ‘calm’ and ‘collected’. With the fast-changing technologies and the rat race that characterize businesses today, it would be suicidal for a businessperson to sit on their laurels as though without a care in the world. To think, even for a moment, that we can sustain successful businesses by just ‘sitting there’ is, to say the least, a fallacy.

As business techniques continue to evolve with speed, businesspersons must likewise evolve by adapting new technologies, techniques, styles, etc.

What worked yesterday may not necessarily work today. The fact that your company has in the past employed certain strategies with tremendous success does not guarantee that the same strategies will yield similar results in the future. You should never be ‘satisfied’ with your achievements to the extent that you stop seeking ways to achieve an even better performance.

And this applies to our personal life too. The moment we become ‘comfortable’ and ‘satisfied’ with who we are and what we have, we kill the desire for improvement. However good you may be, you will always find that there are certain things you can do better.

Let us learn to embrace uncharted terrain, even when we feel like we don’t measure up. When you venture into areas that others have given a wide berth, you become unique, a pioneer! Bill Gates could have opted to get a prime job with a blue chip firm anywhere in the world. This was the comfortable and rational thing to do. Instead, he opted to pursue a dream. Today he is living that dream! He decided to venture away from the mainstream thinking and way of doing things and instead started a company that has today made him the richest man on earth. Is he now ‘cool’, ‘calm’, and ‘collected’? Not by a billion dollars! He is still reinventing himself and the multi-billion-dollar-company he put together from scratch. In that we can all agree that he is really cool – and damn rich too!

Do you want to live a full life? Extend your boundaries a little further from the ‘comfortable’. And when you reach there, stretch them a little further still. In so doing, you will not only reinvent yourself and your business (whatever it is), but you will also contribute to making the world a better place for all!

You will also realize that you’ve got much more stuff in you than you thought you had. With this realization, you can now venture beyond the outer limits of ‘convenience’ and ‘easy-go-lucky’, and the God in you will arise and help you to move yet another mountain!