A comfortable chair and money in the bank can shorten your career. In this Tough Things First podcast, Ray Zinn discusses why discomfort moves people forward while comfort kills.
Rob Artigo: Ray, most people pursue comfort as a goal. If it’s comfort you’re after each day, you’re liable to just become lazy. Am I wrong?
Ray Zinn: No, you’re 100% right. Comfort defines lazy.
Rob Artigo: Where have you seen comfort creep into work environments? We talk about AI a lot on this podcast, and AI can be useful, but it can also lead to complacency where you use AI to draft emails, for example, and maybe you don’t even know what is in the email because you’re in the fast-paced environment. You sort of just skip over it. Oh yeah, well, it must be good because AI wrote it, but it can lead to a sense of being complacent.
Ray Zinn: Yeah, it is so true. It impersonalizes our relationship. Last night, I asked Alexa, “Where do you live?” And because it’s AI, she says, “I live in the cloud. I don’t have a physical address.” But it sounds like you’re talking to a real person, but you’re not. It impersonalizes a relationship if we rely too heavily on AI.
I can recall that when … Well, in fact, I think it was Elon Musk, I believe it was, that said that it won’t be too long before with AI, we won’t be doing anything at all. We’ll just be laying around being comfortable as you would. I think that comfort does inhibit growth and inhibit improvement in our lives. And so I don’t want to become lazy. I don’t want AI to take over all that I’m doing. That would impersonalize my relationship with my family and with my friends if I just become complacent, accept comfort as you would.
I remember this is several years ago, but I was giving a seminar at a school and it was in the Bay Area. The students came dressed in their pajamas. They were laying on beanbags. I was dressed in a suit and they were eating, I don’t know, cinnamon rolls and all kinds. They were just laying back and I was totally dismayed by the way that looked. They weren’t sitting in a desk with tables and chairs and stuff. They were laying in beanbags with their laptops laying on their legs.
And it was just pathetic. I thought, well, we’re raising a bunch of lazy kids. It wasn’t a very structured environment. And obviously structure has its downside and there’s nothing wrong with kicking back and enjoying life. But if that becomes your life, I guarantee you, you’re not going to progress. You’re not going to grow. You need to have adversity to grow. As they say, adversity is like manure. It stinks, but it helps us grow. So we need a little bitter in our life in order to enjoy the sweet. If we become too comfortable, then we will stymie as a person, as a nascent, as a people. We won’t grow.
Rob Artigo: Listeners out there can pick up a pen right now, and we’re going to give them a list of ways to make this part of your daily philosophy in the way that you operate. And I know this for you, Ray, obviously you believe that excellence isn’t accidental. It just doesn’t just happen. If that was the case, you could just sit around and wait for success to come and land on your desk. And that’s not how it works. It takes work to get there.
Ray Zinn: If nothing is happening, nothing will happen.
Rob Artigo: And really, that’s you. You talked about you get up in the morning every day and you start with exercise. You need to have your brain exercising during the day too. Comfort means that you’re not working on anything in your mind.
So number one on this list, calculated risks as a daily practice. That you’re starting out the day knowing what you have to deal with and you’re putting it into practice. And then there’s number two. Don’t wait for crisis. In other words, I mean, a lot of people can be prodded into action if they’re under enough pressure, but if they’re waiting for the crisis to happen for them to get into gear, then they’re wasting an opportunity, right?
Ray Zinn: Yeah. Well, it happened in 2001, that 9/11 thing where they hit the Twin Towers. That’s another example of waiting until it happens, as you would. We have to anticipate these sort of things in order to be prepared for them. Don’t wait for another 9/11.
Rob Artigo: Number three on the list, honest self-assessment. No sugarcoating. That means really being able to look at yourself in the mirror and be honest with yourself.
Ray Zinn: Yeah. And the key here is that if you don’t love yourself, you’re unlikely to love others. And to love yourself also means you have to be proud of who you are. And then you’ll look for the good in others. If you look for the good in yourself, you’ll look for the good in others.
Rob Artigo: Number four, virtually an assignment every week. You should be evaluating yourself honestly, like it says in number three, but also recognize where am I hiding? And I know that when you were CEO of Micrel, when you would ask for the pros and cons from people, you always wanted them to bring to the table a list of cons that are equal to the list of pros so that you were able to be really honest with it. This is a place where you’re saying, hey, you can be honest with yourself and ask yourself, what are the cons that I’m hiding?
Ray Zinn: There’s an ups and there’s downs in life. To say there’s only ups, which is the pros is just crazy. It’s insanity. So you know there’s going to be downs, and that’s the cons. And so knowing what those cons are will help you prepare and enjoy the ups, as you would, what the pros are.
In my experience, when I’ve asked for an evaluation of a particular product or idea, I get about twice as many pros as I do cons. They don’t want to show the cons because they think, well, maybe you won’t want to do the project if they see these cons. And it’s just terrible because that means they’re not looking at the downside and you want to be prepared for it. As you flip a coin, the heads and tails equally. So there’s an equal number of ups as there are downs or downs as there are with ups. So if you don’t look for the downside, you’re unlikely to really be successful in whatever project you’re going to pursue.
Rob Artigo: And last on the list, Ray, of course, it’s do the tough things first. But for the purposes of this list, we said eat the ugly frog first. I mean, really, if you’re going to make something part of your personal ethos, it should be start with the toughest things first.
Ray Zinn: Exactly. So it was called Loving the Things You Hate. So if there’s something I don’t want to do or don’t like doing, I’ll do it first. I’ll get it out of the way and then I’ll enjoy the rest of the day. So there’s a saying about that. Get it out of the way and you’ll enjoy the rest of the day.
Rob Artigo: And we learn that frequently here on The Tough Things First Podcast. I would like to invite the listeners to rate this podcast and follow it on their favorite platform, whatever it may be, wherever it happens to be that you’re getting this podcast right now. We like to direct you to toughthingsfirst.com where all of the podcasts are available and you can go there. And if you need to, you can read it because we have transcripts for those podcasts as well. You can read up on it, peruse it a little bit. And if you see a little watch now link, that means that you can watch the video of the podcast and enjoy it that way.
Follow Ray on X, Facebook and LinkedIn and pick up the books. Tough Things First and as you know, the Zen of Zinn series one, two, and three, those are must reads and so is The Essential Leader, 10 Skills, Attributes, and Fundamentals that make up the Essential Leader. Soft launch in March, The Zen of Zinn Daily. It’s a book of inspirational raisin quotes and action items that you can start your day off on the right foot every day. The Zen of Zinn Daily. Thanks, Ray.
Ray Zinn: Thank you, Rob.
