Blog 11

 Discomfort is Necessary for Innovation

Innovation is defined as a significant  positive change could be technological  could be in your finances your career  even a relationship but it's not just a  little better version of what you  already have its meaningful, it's  transformational, it's even exponential  change for the better and about three  years ago after working with hundreds of  startups and big companies. It's not  even about being in the right place at  the right time it is about discomfort,  it's about embracing not just accepting  discomfort even in actual emergency to  innovate it's on the other side of that  uneasiness that pain that anxiousness  even embarrassment that breakthrough.

They were the first one to invent the digital camera they didn't have the organizational culture to embrace the discomfort necessary to bring that to market and other digital camera companies left them behind the best part about all of this. It is  grounded in biology our brains have  evolved to keep us safe which from an  evolutionary standpoint is genius avoid  the things that are dangerous and we  survive what our brains have also  evolved to feel discomfort during  periods of perceived stress. When we embrace that stress that discomfort versus run from it our body’s sympathetic nervous system uses that stress differently, our heart races blood pumps through our veins and new connections are made in the brain. It's the biological equivalent of opening up an engine and this is why under conditions of competition typical discomfort athletes can perform. They train pretty amazing right and we could talk about innovation and discomfort all day it would just add to the seemingly limitless knowledge potential out there

Next great startup to realize we had that idea avoiding discomfort is the only thing between the linear incremental growth that we accept and quote living up to our potential in fact avoiding discomfort too long never works anyways for people or companies just like Kodak as it hung their hat on print photography even though they’ve never been so many podcasts.