Transformation Is Discomforting

What you want is a continual cycle of strain and adaptation.

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If you don’t push yourself to perform beyond your level of comfort, you don’t improve your performance. Simple as that.

Why? Because performance improvements come from your body adapting to additional strain. No strain, no gain.

Strain can be unpleasant. It’s taxing and it leaves you fatigued. You may feel weak, untalented, even dumb if you’re training an intellectual skill such as math.

But it’s completely necessary. To avoid the feeling of strain is to avoid the process of adaptation, and thus, to avoid performance improvement.

What you want is a continual cycle of strain and adaptation. That’s true in athletics, and it’s just as true outside of athletics.

You feel weak while exercising but you come back stronger.

You feel dumb while studying but you come back smarter.

The thing to remember when studying is that you are physically changing your brain to execute more complicated cognitive tasks.

At a fundamental level it is just like lifting weights or practicing gymnastics. The keys to effective training are the same, and so is the feeling of effective training.

Transformation is discomforting.

But keep in mind that while discomfort is necessary for performance improvement, discomfort alone does not always indicate that you’re engaging in performance-improving activities.

What else is needed? Well, for one, you need to be able to overcome the challenge that’s inducing the discomfort.

Think of it this way: dropping a 500lb-loaded barbell onto the shoulders of a novice lifter would be neither comforting nor productive.

They’ll get crushed, develop no strength, and the only thing they’ll learn from the experience is that they hate strength training.

The same is true for too-difficult math problems, too-difficult pieces of music… you get the idea.

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