The comfort zone - where founders lose

The comfort zone - this is the place where most people will be happy spending time and feeling like they are on top of things; life is easy. Well, guess what? This is exactly where you don’t want to be! Why? Because the comfort zone is where you are not developing yourself as a person or entrepreneur, or making any meaningful progress with your company.

One of my favorite sources of inspiration is David Goggins,an ex-Navy SEAL and all-around wild man of action. His main thesis for achieving superhuman levels of performance, endurance or straight-up survival in the most hostile environments you can imagine is quite simple: start getting comfortable with being uncomfortable.

He argues that there is no way you will ever achieve anything noteworthy without applying yourself and working incredibly hard with consistency, no matter how you feel on any particular day. Professional athletes share this mentality; they get up and do the work every day without fail, not because they decide that morning but because it is who they are; it is their identity to show up and do the work. They seek to improve their performance, and the only way is to practice and work hard.

Another trait of this relentless mentality is not setting limits for yourself on what you can achieve. Only by challenging yourself to do what others consider impossible will you discover and unlock higher levels of performance.

A study of Navy SEALs tried to understand why the people who survived the training program and didn’t give up along the way, made it through. They found no clear reason in  factors such as fitness, strength, body composition, height, goal setting or exhaustion. It had to be their psychology. In the end, they found out that it was the person’s identity that stood out. The people who made it through the program had the identity that they did not quit; it was who they were - people who walk through any challenge and come out the other side. No decisions, just perseverance.

It is the same with personal development: your own self-identity forms over time in response to your environment, your wins, your losses and the journey through which you gain that experience.

Human psychology and biology want to protect you and make you feel safe in stressful environments. There are several biological systems that, working together, are actively shielding you from all forms of danger and stress.

This is where the habit of seeking comfort and engaging in procrastination comes from: putting off work that feels stressful or difficult to some uncertain time in the future. It creates a temporary feeling of comfort: you don’t have to do the work now; it can always be done later.

This is the psychology of compounding underperformance that, over time, keeps you from realising your full potential. This means the only way to get better at what matters to you over time is to do the hard work and tolerate the pain, suffering and sacrifice it takes to endure the process.

How does getting out of your comfort zone apply to entrepreneurship and building companies then? Elon Musk has a pretty unique way of working, which exemplifies taking on the biggest challenges without delay. Since he builds multiple companies at the same time (something to be avoided by mere mortals), he spends a week at a time on one company, solving the biggest problems it's  facing. This means digging into the details and working on solutions with the people who can be most useful. Seeking out the hardest problems and solving them means that he can potentially overcome 52 of the most impactful obstacles each year. Elon is a unique entrepreneur, and his leadership style may not suit everyone, but we can take an important lesson from him that applies to all builders. Take on the hardest work you can at any point in time without fail; don’t put something off because it makes you feel uncomfortable.

I started SumUp when I was 41 years old, with plenty of operational experience and several failed companies and opportunities behind me that hadn’t panned out the way I wanted. It was a time in my life when I wasn’t satisfied with what I had achieved, personally or professionally.

I had this nagging feeling that I was capable of so much more, and that taking on more risk was somehow the way to show myself what I was capable of. At the time, I was a father of three wonderful little boys and needed to balance spending time with them with providing for the family.

I had a conversation with my wife, asking her to support me one last time as I pursued the dream of building a unicorn. We invested what financial resources we had in me co-founding that company and I worked hard as hell. Driven by the reality of having burned my financial support bridges behind me and going all out in the pursuit of finally building a massively successful company, I gave it everything I had and more. The company became  more successful than I could have imagined, growing into a fintech powerhouse spanning 38 countries with over 5M SMB customers.

Why on earth would I do something like that? To risk everything I had achieved so far, including the wonderful family harmony I had at the time? It was my identity; the way I saw myself wasn’t reflected in what I had achieved for myself and my family. I was not content with working as an employee for the security and comfort of a salary.

So I took on massive risk and endured great discomfort and stress to make reality catch up with my identity as a successful founder.

Building a company is very much about building yourself up as a person, your identity and seeing what you can become. In the early days, your company is a compressed version of you; there is not much else to see. As the company grows, you hire people and the product starts coming to life; things change. The company becomes its own entity and you become its steward, making the hard choices along the way on its uncertain journey to eventual success.

I’vespoken with many unicorn founders and listened to their stories. A question I always ask them is “What was the most valuable lesson from the whole experience?” Many answer: “It is the person I had to become in order to be successful.” This resonates with my own journey because only after failing repeatedly and not giving up did I finally build the foundation of a successful company. It was the accumulated experience, blood, sweat and tears that shaped me and the company I was building that made the difference.

Here are a few actionable pieces of advice that you can take away from reading this:

1. Work on yourself as well as your company; you’ll need many skills to be successful as an entrepreneur. Levelling up yourself will have an even bigger effect on your company.
2. Think about what kind of person you want to be; what does the final form of your identity look like? Break that down into habits and actions that you can execute; this will compound over time. Become the best version of yourself and be unstoppable!
3. Ask yourself regularly: Are you taking on the biggest challenges of your life and solving the most pressing problems in your company? If you are putting something off, then this is where you should be looking to execute.

Staying in your comfort zone limits your own performance and consequently, your company’s. Speed of execution is everything in a world where technology is erasing old moats and boundaries of competitive advantage in real time. Be wary of feeling comfortable; it probably means you are not pushing yourself and your company to move fast enough!

Good luck out there, the journey is the way.