Comfort Is Killing Your Greatness (Here's the Wake-Up Call)
Brendon Burchard argues that comfort breeds mediocrity and that greatness requires setting higher demands on yourself and others. He discusses conviction, passion, and leadership as antidotes to settling, and introduces the Growth Day app for maintaining consistent personal development habits.
Some of you need to set a new demand. When you perform at the level of comfort too long, that's called mediocrity. Your job is to maintain and up the demand. You have to be the summoner of heart for yourself. Each day you have to be all in again. There has to be a conviction to engage, a conviction. The hunt. One of the reasons a lot of people change in life is because of what we call demand. You might call it even obligation. You sucked at time management and then you had kids and you had to get better. Right? That's demand. Right. You weren't very good with other people and then you got the promotion. You had to become more to meet the demand. Some of you need to set a new demand. You need to take on a challenge, a harder demand. Like, I'll often when I'm talking with my publisher, I'll be like. They'll be like, how about, you know, June? I'll go, how about April? And I'll push the deadline on myself. Which. Do you know what the comfort. Brendon don't want that. But the performance, Brendan does. You have to set the higher demands. Leaders listen. Your job is to maintain and up the demand. If your company is not performing, you're not instilling the demand, the urgency, the obligation, the ownership. You are taking the mantle of the work. You're heroic. Sometimes you're the martyr. But if this company is not performing, the demand has not been placed into the spirit, the heart and the mind of the people. Because they have no ownership to the demand, they let you keep doing the work. They have no ownership of the demand. They're not setting demands and you're not keeping them accountable to demands or the obligations. So they perform at the level of comfort. And when you perform at the level of comfort too long, that's called mediocrity. And so your team became mediocre because you weren't up in the demand. In fact, most modern leaders placate the demand. I don't want to be too hard on them because I want a culture that's accepting and empathetic and loving and beautiful and there's birds and song. But I'm like, that's not what leaders are built for. When they. When you have a team playing in comfort, it's the worst for a leader. Unless you're not doing job one. If you aren't summoning the best of who you are, they see it. When you live in comfort and you're not placing any demands on you, you're role modeling that mediocrity the hardest thing of a leader to do is go, my company's performance is based on the demands I help instill. It's very hard to do. Raise the expectation, raise the KPIs, raise the OKRs, raise the revenue expectation. If no one's raising those and having talks about raising it consistently, we can't have performance people fall back to their level of comfort. And too much comfort too long is mediocrity and disengagement and boredom. If we want to lift you another level, this is where service comes in. You might call it purpose. Another level of service, another level of contribution. For another word here, it means you're gonna, like. A lot of people meet the obligation of life, and they never become the icon because you can be the demander. You can meet obligation. But that also mean at some level, you're probably fulfilling the task, not fulfilling the heart. Some people are doing busy work. That's the tasks, right? A lot of people are doing busy work, but not their life's work. And that's why they can't find meaning and fulfillment. I know most people, they have busy work. I mean, I sit with people, I'm coaching people all of my life for 25 years. And I can tell you it's really obvious. It's really obvious. A lot of people actually are way harder working than we give them credit for. Our society is way too flippant. My assumption about everybody in this room is you are working really hard. Like, I honor and I respect that. I'm like, life is hard work. Work is hard. Building something great is crazy hard. Way harder. Way harder than most society knows. I mean, exceptionally hard. Like 10 times harder than most people think to build a company, build a brand, build a following, build, you know, history. It's very, very hard to do. But very few people do it because they become great task managers, but not managers of the heart. And then they start wondering, why won't people do the basic tasks? Why are they in mediocrity? Even though I set the demand, we don't have their heart. Your heart's not in it anymore. I've had to say that to a lot of people. It's very hard. It's very hard. I was just with some of the. Let's just call it a very exclusive and incredible group of CEOs, all in the Fortune 50. And a gentleman stood up and asked me a very simple question. He was like, brendan, you know, we're 7/4 down, 7/4 down. What's the most important thing that I could do for my team to get them back to high performance. I asked him a few questions and the way that he responded about the situation, I didn't feel was appropriate. So I told him that. He says, what do you mean? And I just said, I asked the group, I go, how many people in the room? You guys help me out. Because I could be wrong. But you know, sir, you're surrounded by your peers here and they've heard what you just shared and you're looking to me for an answer. I'm just going to see if I'm right with this group, if the audience could help me serve this man right now. When he shared that he's seven quarters down and he talked to us about it, how many of you felt like he was open and honest about it? And everyone raised their hand. Everyone knew it. And I said, and how many of you felt like he was too detached from it? And everyone raised their hand. See, you can know the situation at hand and be honest about it, but if you're too casual and too cool about it, if you're too detached and removed, there's no passion towards it, then sometimes you replace yourself or you summon yourself. In that job, that guy wasn't the CEO. Seven months later, just like you could predict it, he got replaced. Seven months later, he's too detached. You gotta be all in again. You gotta find your conviction again to live this life, to build something extraordinary, to take your business to the next level, to reach more people, to do better art. To have something magnificent in your life. There has to be conviction. It has to be what conviction. You got to find that conviction. And here's the thing, that's the heart, you know, the world doesn't need another half interested set of parents. You know what I'm saying? We don't need more half interested parents. We don't need more half interested teachers. We don't need half interested spouse. You have to be all in again. There has to be a conviction to engage, a conviction to hunt, a conviction to grow. And it has to be way bigger than you might have been making it recently. Because when you start something, it's. It feels joyous. There's novelty, there's challenge, there's something great. You have to be the summoner of heart in your family. You have to be the summoner of heart for yourself each day. You have to be the summoner of heart with your team. You got to put way more energy, way more energy, way more passion into the team and the people in life than you think you do. Your level of passion as a parent is at the level of the family that you want. Your level of passion for your business, is it the level of the conversation with the team or did it become half hearted? Most people, they're hard working and they're half hearted. If you're hardworking and half hearted, you'll be stuck in mediocrity. You can't help yourself. These two things are too closely intertwined. There's too hard of a correlate. You guys have heard the research of grit as an example, passion and perseverance. Lots of people persevere. Very few have psychological grit because they lose the passion. Your job is both. That's why I put this above. That's why I put this above that. Heart, service, mission, drive. That's the stuff.
Hey, my friend, sun is going down behind me and I just want to thank you for watching my YouTube channel. You know, so many of my subscribers are always asking me, brendan, how do I go to another level of my life and stay consistent in my personal development and really get progress?
You know, we all want to be.
More motivated, more productive, more confident. We want to be better leaders. We want to be better at our craft.
But how do you do that on a consistent basis?
Well, that's why I built Growth Day. It's an app that you can use that builds your personal growth streak that every day you come in and you do a series of actions and you listen to some inspirational training and life strategies that advances your life. It's very hard to stay consistent in your life. I know sometimes you watch a YouTube video, you read a book here, you listen to a podcast there, but you're not developing your habits, you're not scoring yourself. You're not finding real progress and insight.
That kind of wows you and opens up to, I say, the awe and the real agency that you have in life.
So please go to Growth Day in the App Store. Just go to the App Store, go to Growth Day, or go to growthday.com and get growth day.
I promise you with your seven day.
Free trial, you'll go through Growth Day. And in seven days you'll be like.
Totally, totally, like feeling fired up. But also you'll find a new momentum.
Because every day as you do your growth streak, you start to really discover what you're made of.
And we access different parts of your brain. You're listing something inspirational. You're doing a checklist or doing a journal prompt that blows your mind.
You're scoring your habits and reflecting on your day in ways you've never done before.
We're basically taking all of personal development.
And putting it into a streak that you'll get, like, totally addicted to. You'll be addicted to that progress, that growth, that joy and energy that you deserve to feel every day. Go to growthday.com or go to the App Store and just download the Growth Day app. Start yourself 7 day free trial and let's level you up. Every day is a great day to grow, but you have to stay consistent to get real progress and to really change your Life. Go to growthday.com or go to the.
App Store and get the Growth Day app right now.
