Comfort Zone
Are you comfortable with what you are doing every day? If so then you aren’t being challenged enough by either your team, your employer or yourself. Comfort leads to complacency – when you don’t have anything snapping at your heels you stop running so fast. A great guy that I work with today bemoaned that he had been comfortable with the project he was on and didn’t want to move to a new one. I was shocked that he wasn’t looking forward to the challenge of a new thing, of overcoming new obstacles and learning new ways to do things. How many people you work with though, or even more importantly are competing against, are like that? Ready to just sit back in their comfort zone and not reach for the next level.
Don’t get comfortable, don’t get complacent, and don’t get caught by all the other people running up behind you.
The “Comfort Zone” is one of the leading causes of inaction that I see every day. People will even fight to the death to keep from getting jolted out of their comfort zone, I’m always amazed at the level of effort people will put into to protecting it. They build up mountains of bureaucracy so they don’t have to change (or do anything foreign) to their daily grind.
There is a Buddhist teaching that I think applies to this, “the impulse to stay busy can be a particularly insidious form of laziness.”