(gentle piano music)
- There's a weird phenomenon I've noticed
all throughout my life
where the more I subject myself to discomfort,
the happier I am.
I think this phenomenon became increasingly apparent to me
in first year of university,
where I wanted to make the best impression possible.
You know, typical freshman behavior.
It's a new school, new network of people,
new city, so I really felt a need
to reinvent who I was as a human being,
especially on a kind of social skills basis.
So in order to do that, I was forcing myself
outside of my comfort zone so frequently,
it's as if it was some sort of game.
It's like I was able to peel back a layer of reality
and see some sort of one-to-one relationship
between subjecting myself to discomfort
and upgrading who I was as a human being.
Now that I'm in my old age, I don't necessarily think
that is a one-to-one relationship, more on that later,
but I was definitely onto something,
because I felt incredible.
I was energetic, optimistic,
I remember waking up in the morning not being tired
because I was ready to tackle the day with energy,
and although this euphoria didn't last forever,
I never forgot how I felt.
And I remember the importance of viewing the comfort zone
and the effect it has on your overall wellbeing
and the way you live your life.
So in this video, we're gonna talk
about a few things that I've learned
about the comfort zone, and how I think
if you can gain a better understanding
of how the comfort zone works,
you can start living life on your terms
instead of its terms.
Because it has a lot more control
over the way you live your life than you might think.
So here are some things
that I've discovered about the comfort zone,
and hopefully, you can apply them to your life, as well.
So everything you're physically capable of doing
in this world falls into one of two categories:
inside the comfort zone or outside the comfort zone.
The things that are inside the comfort zone
are easy for you to do, comfortable,
they take little or no effort to do,
and there's pretty much no mental resistance
in the way of doing that thing, like driving.
For a lot of people, driving
is completely in the comfort zone.
You know, you drive to work, you drive to your house,
you drive to the store to pretend to buy vitamins
so you can get footage for this video.
Since driving is so easy, at one point or another,
your brain went and subconsciously placed it
inside the comfort zone.
So you don't really think about doing it
before you do it, it's just something you do.
Okay, how about going for a run?
A lot harder, isn't it?
It's more physically strenuous,
requires more preparation, it makes you lose your breath
or sweat, and if you haven't ran for a while,
you'll probably be really sore the next day.
And because you know running is physically strenuous,
and hard to do, your brain at one point or another
went and placed it outside the comfort zone.
The further outside the comfort zone something is,
the more mental resistance there is
in the way of doing that thing.
But here's where things get kind of interesting.
Running is good for you.
After a week of running every day,
you can find that your mental energy increases,
your outlook on life is better
and more optimistic, and after a week of driving,
you kind of feel nothing.
It's just driving.
So there really isn't a clear cut relationship
between things that are inside the comfort zone,
outside the comfort zone,
and the value that these things have on your life.
In fact, the comfort zone is terrible
at telling you what's good for you
and what's bad for you.
What activities you should adopt into your life
and what activities you should avoid.
So let's take walking, for example.
Walking is probably inside your comfort zone,
and running is outside of it.
But it doesn't mean that walking is bad for you,
in the same way stabbing yourself in the leg
with a pencil is probably outside of your comfort zone
but it doesn't mean it's good for you.
So there really isn't a clear cut relationship
between things that are inside the comfort zone,
outside the comfort zone,
and the value that these things have on your life.
All the comfort zone is concerned with
is keeping you inside of it.
And the way it does that is
not only does it make sure that things outside of it
are really uncomfortable and hard to do,
it's also always shrinking
if you don't do anything about it.
Unless you venture at least a little bit
beyond the borders of the comfort zone,
it will get smaller and harder to escape.
And this is something that most people
have experienced in their lives,
whether they're aware of it or not.
In my own life, this happens all the time.
Like when Halo Five came out a few years ago,
I spent so much time just playing it
for hours and hours every day,
eating Doritos Sweet Chili Heat
and drinking Mountain Dew like a real gamer,
and after days of doing this,
binging a video game and not doing
anything outside of my comfort zone,
things that were previously just on the edge
of my comfort zone, like going to the gym,
the comfort zone shrank to a point
where going to the gym was now extremely difficult
and very hard to bring myself to do.
You may have also experienced this type of thing
where maybe you're on vacation,
and it's sort of one of those sit around
and don't really do much vacations,
you're kind of on your phone a lot,
on the couch, maybe the weather's really nice,
and you start to become soft, you know?
You don't really want to do many interesting things
or very hard things or anything
that would take much effort.
You kind of just become a blob
and you feel pathetic.
Okay, so what have we learned?
We've learned that in order to keep the comfort zone
from shrinking, we have to do things
that are outside of the comfort zone
to keep the comfort zone large.
But we also learned that the comfort zone in general
is a pretty terrible guide for telling us
what to do with our life,
what activities are useful to us
and what activities don't really do anything.
So basically, we need a solution to this problem.
We need a more reliable guide for making decisions.
And I think you can't go wrong
with making values based decisions.
Your values.
Figure out what kind of person you want to be,
what kind of traits you want to adopt,
what kind of skills you want to learn,
and make your decisions based off of that.
And using the knowledge of the comfort zone,
be aware that any potential discomfort
in the way of doing the thing that you want to do
isn't a real obstacle, it's all just in your head.
If you live life this way, the comfort zone
can also work in your favor
because as you start living this new lifestyle
that may have at first been unnatural to you,
the longer you live that way,
the comfort zone is expanding to meet you.
So living the way you want to live
will become increasingly natural
and, dare I say, comfortable.
So to bring this whole thing
back to my freshman year, it's becoming clear to me that
the reason I felt so good
wasn't necessarily because I was
just uncomfortable all the time.
The reason I felt so good
was because I was living the life
that I wanted to live
and I disregarded discomfort altogether.
And when you no longer let discomfort
have a say in how you make any of your decisions,
the potential for what you can do with your life
expands dramatically.
So you guys may have noticed
that a lot of the B roll shots today
were quite cinematic.
That was because I was able to rent
a Sony FX9, which is a Netflix-approved cinema camera,
and I was only able to do that
because of awesome sponsors like Skillshare,
which is a really relevant sponsor
to today's video topic,
especially if you use the classes
to help you develop skills you really want to work on.
For instance, I'm currently taking
Storytelling in Film: Using Cinematography
to Convey Emotion, by Joe Simon,
which is directly relevant to
the cinematography skill I'm trying to develop.
For those of you who don't know, Skillshare
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Explore your creativity,
and as usual, have a great time.
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Anyways, that's all for today.
Thank you for watching,
and we'll catch you in the next video.
(gentle piano music)