Whenever I read a Seth Godin book, I come away with 20-50 ideas worth processing. Here is one of them generated from Linchpin.
Linchpin, by the way, is the one book by Godin that I most disagreed with… but that is good. Some of my favorite books are ones with which I violently disagreed. My disagreements with Godin are amiable and respectful. But here is no disagreement, just agreement and elaboration.
One of my favorite cartoon strips from Calvin and Hobbes, had to do with Calvin's dad encouraging Calvin to try something hard and difficult - since it builds character. To Calvin, of course, this made absolutely no sense at all.
To Seth Godin, it makes lots of sense (page 115-116). For when we are comfortable we are coasting. When we are comfortable we are not growing. We need resistance, challenge, discomfort to be stimulated, and roused to growth and change.
Godin also makes the humorous and right on target observation, "Inevitably, we exaggerate just how uncomfortable we are." And our exaggeration of the discomfort creates an even greater avoidance mechanism on our part.
So today's question(s) are obvious:
What is challenging for you these days?
What is taking you out of your comfort zone?
What is, right now, hard to do and perhaps beyond what you can do?
What are the hard, uncomfortable things you are avoiding right now?
And what are you going to do about it after reading this post?
Hey, go out and do something really hard… it builds character.
Brian K. Rice
Leadership ConneXtions International
www.lci.typepad.com
