A think a concept I wrote about the other day will become useful as a reference for the life you get if you value passive physical pleasure and comfort over emotional reward and development, which often come from actively challenging yourself and taking risks.

How to create perfect comfortable life

If you want to avoid physical or emotional pain, since the following things risk creating them, you’d better cut them out:

• Meeting new people
• Caring about what you do
• Trying new business ideas
• Exercise
• Sports
• Challenging yourself

Walking is risky (“When did walking three miles become a health risk?“). Caring about things is risky (“Leadership, personal development, choosing to care, and emotional pain.”). If you want safety, security, and comfort, cut those risks out, along with cooking with knives or fire and other activities at home. The more raw food is, the more recently it came from the ground, with all its germs. You’re safer getting food processed through a factory to make it more clean and uniform.

The perfect comfortable life

Here is the perfect comfortable life:

1. Buy the most comfortable couch you can.
2. Buy the most comprehensive cable and internet package you can.
3. Buy the easiest-to-prepare food you need only microwave.
4. Every day, drive home and watch entertainment from your couch eating your reheated pre-cooked food.
5. If boredom or thoughts that question this lifestyle develop, change to a more entertaining show to crowd out those thoughts.
6. Avoid everything else: exercise, relationships, meeting people at all, trying to get ahead, and so on.

Now you have a life of physical pleasure and minimal risk.

Sound horrible?

If that life sounds horrible, think about raising your threshold for

• What you protect yourself against.
• What level of discomfort and pain you’ll accept.
• What risk you’ll accept in your personal and business life.

I’d suggest going further: explore your limits on not protecting yourself, experiencing discomfort and pain, and taking on risks. The more you explore your limits, the more you can expand them. The more you expand them the more comfort and security you feel in regular life — not because your life doesn’t have risk or pain but because you know how to handle it. You become resilient.

Funny how both directions — taking on risk and avoiding it — lead to comfort and security. The comfortable couch way minimizes risk along the way. The exploring limits way virtually guarantees pain and injury along the way, but gives you the tools to handle problems.

Your choice of how much of each you want, but if you call people who explore their limits crazy, recognize you’re suggesting they add a bit of comfortable couch, a lifestyle they probably know about. Instead of judging them, consider that you could learn from them.

Sound awesome?

As far as I know, many people choose the perfect comfortable lifestyle although I don’t think I know any. If it works for them I applaud their choice even though I wouldn’t make it. For all I know, their pleasure outweighs my emotional reward and pain. Still, I choose to explore my limits.

• ← The 42.3 degree shower (5.7 Celcius): Trading fleeting discomfort for long-term reward and growth
• Quiet garbage: a feel-good book on introversion that promotes complacency and limiting beliefs →