A person much smarter than I once said:
Overcoming comfort is like overcoming gravity.
I love that quote. It reminds me of two truths — one frustratingly hard, the other beautifully blissful:
Being comfortable (and its ugly cousin ‘being scared’) is, in my eyes, the number one reason why people don’t take a risk, follow their heart and do what they ought to do. Countless startups never get founded, technologies don’t get commercialized, empires aren’t being built because we are comfortable in the here and now. I am certainly guilty of this — and I hope that I am better than most pushing myself out of my own comfort zone. But once you have established a certain baseline of creature comfort, it is insanely hard to leave this behind and start fresh. It truly is like a rocket launching from the ground, needing to overcome gravity.
And yet — once you have made the decision to leave comfort behind, to face your fears and you reach escape velocity, suddenly everything becomes easy. Instead of fighting gravity, you are floating in space. What seemed and was hard, is now easy.
Take solace in the fact that it will get easier. That starting is the hardest thing and that every single step after the first will get progressively easier (not saying that it will be easy overall — after all, it requires a lot of effort to keep a spaceship safely in orbit) but you don’t need to fight gravity anymore once you left it behind.
Godspeed Heretics!