Last week, after months of deliberation, I shadowed an acting class. I wasn’t sure what to expect–it took everything in me just to show up. I have no desire to be an actor and there’s no hidden talent buried within me. In fact, the thought of acting makes me want to curl up and die. So what the hell was I doing there?

For those committed to personal growth, discomfort is considered a positive. And it often is. But discomfort can signal different things.

Sometimes discomfort is a sign that you’re growing and pushing the boundaries of your comfort zone or current abilities. Other times it acts an alert, warning you of a misguided decision.

The same concept holds true for exercise. There’s a discomfort that you push through to build strength or endurance. But there’s also a discomfort that signals injury. If you attempt to push through the latter, you compound the mistake and end up worse for it. While exercise is based more on feeling and experience, personal growth shares similar elements.

A certain level of stress is important. As Nassim Taleb, philosopher and writer, explains in his book Antifragile, “Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty.” The key is finding the right threshold.

“Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire. Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind.”

— Nassim Taleb

What’s worth sticking out?

Whenever I’m in an uncomfortable situation, I apply the same rule of thumb that I use to evaluate whether or not something is worth quitting.

I start by asking myself, “Do I feel nervous or uncomfortable because this is difficult? Or do I feel nervous because something’s off and this contradicts my character, values, or principles?”

The former is worth sticking out because that’s where personal growth stems from. The latter means it’s probably time to bow out and reassess.

With the acting class, my primary motivation was using it as an experiment to improve my public speaking skills. I came across the idea over coffee with a friend and fellow writer, Lily Hansen. She told me how her background in acting helped improve her stage presence and presentation skills. It was an interesting angle that I thought worth testing out.

But the fact remained, I was nervous and in no way looking forward to the class. It took a disproportionate amount of energy to even schedule it. But I followed through because it aligned with an area of my life that I wanted to improve.

Another way of looking at this is by using a model James Clear suggests, and asking yourself, “Does this behavior help me become the type of person I wish to be? Does this habit cast a vote for or against my desired identity?”

The acting class was a vote for my desired identity, not as an actor, but as a stronger communicator and storyteller. I looked at it as an opportunity to arm myself with techniques to build greater comfort presenting in front of an audience.

“Does this behavior help me become the type of person I wish to be? Does this habit cast a vote for or against my desired identity?”

— James Clear

The nuance of discomfort

There’s also a nuance to discomfort that’s worth taking into account. As circumstances change, the type of discomfort can shift beneath you. Earlier this year, a few technology companies reached out about open positions. I went through with the interviews–nerves and all–because I knew they would help me hone my skills, clean up my thinking, and explore my options.

But when it came to an offer, it was a different type of discomfort. I was able to step back and identify that my hesitation was because it didn’t line up with my priorities for the immediate future. I was still more excited about my current team, our upcoming challenges, and what we were building.

In that context, the decision to leave such a positive situation seemed foolish. I didn’t want to jump at the first new opportunity I came across, I wanted the right opportunity. And that meant doubling down on my current position.

The difficult part is that you have to preserve a deep sense of awareness to avoid rationalizing decisions beyond all recognition. There will be moments when you fail to rise to the occasion. Your natural instinct will be to seek out evidence to affirm you made the right decision–confirmation bias.

But life is rarely as neat and orderly as you might hope. You won’t always know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you made the right or wrong decision. You just have to assess things to the best of your ability and learn along the way. With greater awareness of your cognitive biases and what discomfort means in different contexts, you’ll be able to make better decisions.

Growth and self-preservation

If you take an impulse at face value, you’ll never be able to differentiate between the shades of discomfort. Consider what side of the spectrum the discomfort you’re facing falls on. One leads towards growth and the other self-preservation.

There will be moments when you’re uncomfortable. That’s not always a bad thing. The vast majority of us would be better off with more adventure, discomfort, and randomness in our lives. But you have to know the difference between stupid risks and opportunities for growth.

If it aligns with your character, it’s worth pushing through those difficult moments when you feel like quitting. No matter how uncomfortable you might be. It’s the discomfort from situations that contradict your character or priorities that deserve a second look.

When it comes to remarkable leaders, artists, scientists, and entrepreneurs, each individual has their own set of principles. But there is one underlying strategy that remains constant, revealing itself in different shades across each person–creating more and consuming less.

It’s through the work you put out into the world and the way you live your life that you build a sense of meaning. Smart creatives understand this in a deep way. By creating more, you claim a larger part of yourself.

Strategies like this help build energy, establish your identity, and inform the tactics you put in place. While it takes shape in different mediums, the overall strategy is to create more and consume less. It’s the mental framework which informs smaller decisions throughout the day.

Tactics are the individual pieces that comprise the larger whole. They differ in that they require an initial investment up front. It’s what you dedicate time and energy to on a daily basis to reinforce your strategy.

Author and habit expert, James Clear, explains habits as the individual votes you cast each day for a certain identity. The same concept applies here. Tactics are the individual votes you cast each day for a certain strategy. If your strategy is to create more and consume less, you need tactics to help encourage both.

1) Make it difficult to do the easy thing (consuming)

Adding resistance can be a powerful tactic. You want to make it harder to mindlessly consume. If you struggle with Netflix, unplug the television or sign out of your account after each use. If you struggle with social media, change your passwords at the start of each week and sign out of your accounts so you can’t easily access them.

It’s amazing how impactful it can be to move things out of plain sight. Whatever’s undermining your creative energy, add more resistance so you can redirect that towards something you find greater meaning in.

2) Make it easier to do the difficult thing (creating)

This is about environment design. Building something from nothing is difficult enough as is, don’t make it any harder on yourself. Prioritize time and space for your craft to reach a deeper level of focus and creativity.

For years, my place for creativity at home–where I would sit down to write–was a couch that faced the television in my living room. And to further compound the problem, I wasn’t attempting this during quieter hours of the day. It was while people were coming and going, stopping to watch Netflix, sitting down for a meal. There were incessant distractions.

But this past year, I carved out physical space dedicated to writing. I converted one of our bedrooms to a writing studio/library and it’s made a significant difference. I also started writing first thing in the morning while my mind is fresh and I have two quiet hours before work.

Dedicating time and space where you can focus without interruption on your craft will allow you to grow exponentially faster. It’s the first step towards taking yourself and your art seriously.

Make it easier to do the right thing. This doesn’t mean sitting around waiting for ideal conditions or until you’re completely prepared, otherwise you’ll be waiting forever. It means setting yourself up for success through the things you can control in your immediate environment.

3) Pair positive reinforcements

Four years ago, when I first started taking writing seriously, I paired my writing sessions with my favorite coffee shop in Nashville. I walked over in the evenings after work to sit down and write. It’s something I looked forward to every day because of the atmosphere, the music I would listen to and, of course, the caffeine. This reinforcement helped me rediscover writing as a creative outlet.

Now I automatically associate these cues with my creative process. Coffee, coffee shops, and ambient music are shortcuts that jump me into a state of relaxed concentration that I need to do my best writing.

4) Allow yourself to get stuck

At the first sign of boredom or discomfort, most of us instinctively search for distractions and outlets for immediate gratification. And we do so without even recognizing it.

Until recently, the moment I slowed down or felt stuck in my own writing, I coped by jumping between tabs in Chrome–checking email, looking up restaurants for dinner, scrolling through Twitter.

The secret is to allow yourself to get stuck and sit with something. Once I gave myself permission to sit there without looking away, my resilience and creativity improved immediately.

Momentum is easier to come by when you don’t look away at the first challenging moment. Bouncing between distractions won’t result in some magical insight. Give yourself permission to get stuck.

“Too many people believe that everything must be pleasurable in life, which makes them constantly search for distractions and short-circuits the learning process. The pain is a kind of challenge your mind presents–will you learn how to focus and move past the boredom, or like a child will you succumb to the need for immediate pleasure and distraction.”

— Robert Greene

For writers: Tools aren’t everything but they can be helpful. I’ve found Ulysses to be one of the best investments I’ve made ($5/month). It helps facilitate each of these first four tactics. Its typewriter mode is fullscreen which makes it easier to focus, harder to jump between distractions (web, email, text messages), and the daily goals feature helps create a strong positive reinforcement.

5) Create a distraction-free phone

For most of us, myself included, our phones are our number one source of distraction. Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky outline the tactic that is a distraction-free phone in their book Focus. It’s one of the most influential tactics I’ve found in the past year. There are three main components:

Delete infinity-pools apps (social media) from your phone
Delete email accounts from your phone
Delete/disable the web browser on your phone

These might sound extreme, but let me explain. Last year I took step one, deleting infinity-pools apps (sources of never-ending streams of content). But the energy I wasted on social media was replaced by checking email, random websites, and Googling everything that crossed my mind.

It was only after I took steps two and three, despite my initial reservations, that I saw a measurable difference in my focus and creativity. There’s now far less clutter and distraction in my day-to-day. As a result, the clarity of my thoughts has improved and I have more opportunities to create.

I recognize this might strike terror in you. But test it out for a week and see how it goes. I no longer reach for my phone as a crutch in moments of boredom. And it taught me how many meaningless things cross my mind and how few emails (zero) require an immediate response.

6) Keep a journal instead

If you cut the time spent on your phone in half and replaced that with journaling, you’d improve your balance between creating and consuming within a matter of days. I leave a journal sitting on the table of whichever room I’m in at home. I jot down ideas as they come to me, intentions in the morning, reflections in the evening, beginnings of articles, and whatever else captures my curiosity.

The act of writing on paper allows you to explore concepts and draw connections in ways that you can’t on a screen. Your ideas take on a different dimension. Not to mention the fact that it eliminates the threat of distractions you face on a phone, tablet, or computer.

But the biggest advantage of journaling is that it helps build awareness. By reflecting, you gain insight into your own behaviors and tendencies, rather than wandering through life on autopilot. If you want to create more and consume less, you have to start by recognizing what you’re doing well and where there’s room to improve.

7) Use art as inspiration

This is not to say that you shouldn’t appreciate other people’s work. But you should use it as inspiration to create something of your own. Actively engage in the things you’re watching, reading, listening to, and consuming. Try to engage, form connections, and draw insights of your own. (Check out my book notes on 70+ titles for an example of how I approach this while reading.)

Use books, films, documentaries, paintings, research, and keynotes as inspiration to create more. If you’re a writer, weave one of the connections you made into your next article. If you’re an entrepreneur, adapt one of the stories to your current project and share it with your team to build stronger engagement.

The goal is to create an active mental landscape that’s alive with hundreds of connections. It directly benefits your creativity and craft when you’re able to combine ideas across disciplines in new and interesting ways.

8) Start small

Don’t go off the deep end and commit to twelve hours of creating each day. You’ll burn yourself out before you ever get started and make it difficult to recover. Instead, begin from a more sustainable place.

If you want to write more music, start with fifteen minutes each day then build from there. That’s how you create momentum. Develop habits that are sustainable and allow them to grow steadily over time.

Remind yourself that growth is nonlinear. Don’t expect immediate results. People tend to overestimate what they can accomplish in the short-term and underestimate what they can accomplish over the course of years. The power of small, calculated decisions and tactics grows exponentially over time. Start small and let compound interest run its course.

9) Find a medium that resonates with you

While every remarkable mind shares some sense of this strategy to create more and consume less, the medium varies. For J.K. Rowling it’s writing, Jay-Z it’s music, Scott Belsky it’s design and technology, Alexander von Humboldt it was exploration and science, Leonardo da Vinci it was art and engineering.

If you need a better starting place, consider the medium that resonates with you. Robert Greene, author of The Laws of Human Nature, suggests reflecting on three areas to help with this:

Inclinations in your earliest years–moments of fascination with certain subject, objects, or activities.
Moments when certain tasks or activities felt natural to you.
Particular forms of intelligence your brain is wired for.

The key is determining what’s meaningful to you and not absorbing what’s important to someone else as your own. Otherwise, you’ll miss the mark.

This is perhaps the most difficult skill of all–sorting through the noise and determining your own sense of authenticity. This requires years of exploration and reflection to determine for yourself. But it’s the only way to sustain a creative mindset and find meaning in your work.

As a rule of thumb, it’s better to lean towards the mentality of a strategist than a tactician. Those who have the patience to expand their perspective of time and the endurance to play the long game put themselves at a significant advantage. There are multiple paths and hundreds of tactics you can use you reach the end goal.

These tactics are meant to help you find your own starting place. Use them to create momentum and discover what works best for you. Experiment and remain flexible. There’s no correct path or proper sequence of decisions. What matters is that the overall strategy to create more and consume less is held in constant focus.

The Two Sides of Discomfort