Strive

Chapter 3Easy sucks

From a marketing perspective the thing that striving has against it is that it involves struggle. The problem with struggle is that it brings along its friend discomfort. A far more appealing message to send out to people is that they will get a life that is pleasurable, full of positive emotion and free of discomfort. We are obsessed with comfort and it has made us allergic to discomfort. However, what my and my team’s research shows is that things being too easy is devastating for human beings. We need life to be challenging. Put bluntly, ‘Easy sucks’.

We won’t sit with discomfort

The main reason we want our life to be easy is that not everyone has drunk the ‘discomfort is good for me’ Kool-Aid. In fact, it seems that we are no longer able to sit with discomfort in any form. Because we see discomfort as a bad thing, as soon as we feel it, we seem to have a knee-jerk reaction that propels us to try to get away from it. Unfortunately, our attempts to make the discomfort go away result in us often falling into dysfunctional behaviours. To find evidence of this, you just have to look at any political (or other) debate on social media and see how quickly it descends into name-calling and threatening language. Rather than following the impulse to make discomfort go away we need to have a more functional relationship with struggle. This is vitally important for business as our research is showing that the competitive advantage in business today is the ability ...