Simon Sinek discusses how many young people are uncomfortable with discomfort and often avoid difficult but important interactions (e.g., asking for raises), sometimes quitting instead. He argues teaching people to tolerate discomfort and helping them build deep, caring relationships (which social media and phones can undermine) fosters resilience and long-term advantages.
Chapters
One common trend about this young generation is they're very uncomfortable with discomfort. When something gets uncomfortable, they would rather quit or leave than manage discomfort. And we see this manifest in very strange ways in the private sector. For example, multiple stories of young people who are so uncomfortable with the idea of having a confrontation with their boss. When I say confrontation, I mean like asking for a raise. Like, they're so uncomfortable with the thought of asking for a raise or the fear of being declined for that raise that they quit. They quit their job instead of asking for the raise that they think they deserve. And usually in spectacular fashion with an email that says, you don't value me because I want more money. And so I think teaching people, teaching young people how to be uncomfortable is a big part of it. And the question is, well, how do you do that? And that goes to part two, which is you can much more easily manage discomfort when you feel like you have somebody to the left of you and to the right of you who cares about you. And that's another challenge for young generations, which is they seem, for various reasons, which we can or don't have to get into, but they seem to struggle with forming deep, meaningful relationships. The phone is a big part of it, and the addictive qualities of social media are a big part of it. I think to contextualize what they're going to get, as opposed to them just going through it and then us playing defense for us to prepare them that this will be uncomfortable, this will be difficult, but here's what you're going to get by helping them understand the context and helping them understand that the relationships they build and how they learn to rely on each other to manage the discomfort not only makes them a more independent group as a group, but it'll be a skill set that will leave them with a huge advantage for the rest of their lives. And so I think it's really about empathy and understanding the characteristics of each generation, again, not in terms of good or bad or right or wrong, in terms of different. And understanding when those things are advantages and disadvantages.
