people think leaving one’s comfort zone means doing something grandiose and large; like starting a company or switching careers or moving countries. this of course is true, but not necessarily the only way to do it. not everything needs to be so extreme!

life lessons come in a variety of shapes and sizes. sometimes, if you have the existential literacy skills, you can get a lot of bang for your buck.

the point I’m belaboring here is that sometimes leaving your comfort zone could be as simple as wearing a different shirt or trying a new haircut.

the trivial scale of these such activities makes them seem worthless in the process, but what they’re really doing is training your frontal lobe to work through a sensation of uncomfortableness, likely resulting in a “see, that wasn’t so bad.”

there’s been many dates and clothes and songs and information and experiences in general that I simply did not want to do or acquire or experience in some sense. in my bones, in my cells, I did not want to do it.

I did it anyway, and things were largely fine.

in the same way that life often offers you a cookie test — you know, the thing where you can have one cookie now, or wait until a specified time and place an receive two cookies. the patience demonstrated in this test is highly correlated with success in life btw. something to note. but the point here is there are other tests that life gifts us, one of which being the opportunity to take charge of our own lives, to work through sensations of aversiveness, to fight.

now, of course, as mentioned, you need to have a sense of literacy skill when decided what uncomfortable situations you train this mental muscle with. put simply: don’t be a hero, champ. know when you’re going to overextend yourself and cause more harm than good.

so that’s today’s lesson. the thought of the day. you need to do things you don’t want to do. it’s quite literally the process of cultivating discipline and courage and strength and Being A Person Of Your Word.

you want to be those things, don’t you? don’t you, anon?