The Best Moments of Your Life Weren’t Comfortable

Think of the best moment of your life, and I'll bet you it wasn't on a couch.

Welcome aboard to The Daily Podcast, my friend.

Is it not true that, uh, the greatest moments of your life have probably not

involved a large bowl of some delicious treat and a Netflix remote in your hand?

Yes, you probably had some good experiences there.

I'm sure there's been times of rest and recreation where a couch and

popcorn or some other delightful treat and some absorbing entertainment

was a special moment for you.

But can we agree together, it is highly unlikely, is it not, that at the end of

your life you will look back and remember the greatest moments of Netflix binging

as the pinnacle of your experience?

Because you know the truth that what is most memorable for you in your life

will have been those peak experiences when you were doing things that

stretched you, that test you-- tested you, that were beautiful, that absorbed

you, that took your natural gifts and potential and, and made you work hard

to achieve something really memorable.

You know this is true, right?

Like, can you think of one of the greatest experiences of your life so far, one of

the greatest achievements of your life?

Try and think just for a second.

I'll give you some dead air time.

Ready?

Greatest experience, memory of your life, uh, where you exerted yourself,

where you were performing at your best.

Think about it now.

What was it?

So what I'm gonna suggest to you is that those moments arrive when your unique

gifts, talents, and abilities are deployed towards something that tested, absorbed

you, or stretched you to your potential.

And the irony, of course, is that we spend the vast majority

of our life not in those places.

So our downtime, our distracted time tends to exha- absorb so much of our time.

I'm not talking about rest.

I'm a huge advocate of deliberate, purposeful rest.

The purpose of rest is to rebuild the architecture of who you are

so you can go out and perform at a consistent level and even higher level.

So the research is so clear on this.

The-- You may have heard of flow states, right?

This goes back to the researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is I

think how you pronounce the name.

It's one of the hardest names to pronounce in all literature.

But his research on peak flow states argued that it arrives when skill,

when your skill meets a challenge just beyond it So peak states, the pinnacle

moments of our lives arrive when our skills meet challenges that are just

beyond the current level of our skill.

They are voluntary.

It's voluntary, stretched effort towards something difficult and worthwhile.

So this is like somebody who might be like a gifted rock climber who

suddenly finds themselves in a really challenging situation they haven't

done before, or maybe like a, a surgeon doing a really difficult operation.

They're halfway through and they're completely absorbed and present in it.

Same for maybe musicians or artists.

Absorbed, tested, fully deployed.

I shared a few epi-episodes ago, the first time I did an audience of 10,000 people

plus in a convention center in the US, and I walk out there, I got 10,000 people, and

that's one of the greatest experiences I had because it was like 10,000 plus people

are staring at you, and you've gotta be there for like 40 minutes and bring it.

And it was such a joy, like such an absorbing, memorable experience because,

you know, I'd been speaking for many, many years, but it was my, my gifts,

my abilities, my preparation, my organization, my energy and effort all

coalescing to this one moment that really stretched me to deliver my very best.

So the implication of this, so what, what's the opening thesis?

Is that the best moments in your life come from deploying your skills just

beyond your current level of real comfort.

So the s- disturbing implication is that we spend most of our discretionary

time on the exact activities least capable of producing our best states.

Think of how much time people spend scrolling, streaming, passive consumption

of content, then wonder why their leisure leaves them tired or exhausted.

You've had that feeling like you've been doom scrolling for two hours and

you just feel absolutely exhausted.

I remember once being in a, uh, in a hotel room in Austin, Texas, and I was speaking,

but my body clock was completely shot because I'd been to America and back to

Australia twice in the space of 10 days.

So I'd flown from Australia to America, done some speaking, flown

back to Australia, turned around a few days later and flown back.

And I remember just like scrolling, and I'm just there because I couldn't

sleep, and then the scrolling just wipes you out even more, and suddenly

you blink and hours have gone.

You're like, "What, what, what just, what did I just learn? What, how

am I better for this experience?" So we wonder, you know, why these

behaviors can leave us exhausted.

It's crucial to understand that we just, you know, it wasn't our choice,

but we got born at a moment in history where we're not particularly tested.

Think about our ancestors.

If you didn't do what you had to do, you starved or, you know, life

went really badly for you if you weren't constantly pushing yourself

to provide, to perform, to do.

And we've just got this moment in history where it's really quite different.

So if you want an uncommon life If you want to build a really different life, one

of the key things is going to be learning to choose, and this is the operative

word, choose, to deliberately place yourself in environments and circumstances

that push you to take whatever gifts God's given you and exercise

them at a higher and higher level.

So there's a quote here in my research notes that says, "Optimal experience

occurs when the body or mind is stretched to its limits in voluntary effort towards

something difficult and worthwhile." These are the great memories of your life.

When you place yourself in-- I wrote an entire chapter on this.

If you go to your-- p- this pod- any podcast platform you're on, just go

to the podcast platform and search Jonathan Doyle, Bridging the Gap.

So my free book is there.

So I wrote… My first book that I ever wrote covers this exact topic, and the

audio version is there for you completely free, Jonathan Doyle, Bridging the Gap.

And there's a chapter in there, I can't remember which, I think it might be

chapter five, where I talk about these things called threshold experiences,

in that the real growth in our life happens when we place ourselves on

the threshold of our current level of capacity and go just beyond it.

And I want you to also understand, last week I did an episode, I think

it's called the Lindy Effect, that the latest information you hear is

usually incorrect, which means that the oldest ideas in history are usually

the best ones because they've been-- they've had to pass the test of time.

And as we talk about this topic, Aristotle, two and a half thousand years

ago, was talking about the same thing.

Greek philosophy argued that each person had inside them something

called a daemon, not a demon, a daemon, which is like source code.

It's like software code.

And the purpose of the good life in classical philosophy, the virtuous life,

was to live, uh, your life as excellently as possible so that this daemon could

become fully actualized in the world.

You know what this means?

The Greeks argued that if you lived in a particular way, you would become

the fullest possible expression of what you could become, and they

called it becoming a eudaimon.

And the process was eudaimonia, living in such a way that your

unique gifts, talents, and abilities were unleashed over time.

And the path of that was excellence, was to choose circumstances, behaviors

that would force you to become the fullness of what you could become.

So this is a very ancient idea.

So when you see modern s- sort of researchers and scientists saying,

"Yeah, human flourishing seems to happen when people voluntarily choose to be

tested and have their skills really pushed," and you have a philosopher two

and a half thousand years before that scientist saying exactly the same thing,

maybe there's something in that for us.

So- I would like to ask you, where are you being pushed?

Where are you choosing to use your skills, gifts, talents, and abilities

in ways that genuinely test you, not just that are comfortable for you?

So many great musicians, artists, athletes deliberately push themselves

into circumstances that really test them.

I was reading deeply, uh, recently about Mozart, and Mozart, who we'd all

recognize one of the greatest talents in history, had this moment in his 20s

when he finally decided to break with his father, and he went out on his own

and pushed himself into a whole new city with new people and new pressures, and

he had the most f- phenomenal creative burst that lasted about four years

because he voluntarily placed himself in a new situation where his skills

and talents would be truly tested.

So you can see this pattern that the great men and women of history often just

make choices that force them to grow.

It's an amazing thing about being human, you know, uh, that we have

this invitation, this possibility, and we-- and many people don't take it up.

You can choose to be very passive.

You can choose to live your life in a comfort zone, or you can say to

yourself, "No, I'm good at this thing.

Where do I go where it's a bit harder?" In my own career, you know, I've constantly

sought more and more challenging speaking and coaching environments,

constantly trying to push myself.

Every day I'm in the gym, no matter how tired I am, I'm always trying to

just make myself go hard on the thing that need-- I need to go hard on.

It's a mindset, it's a belief, it's a passion, and the results

over time are quite extraordinary.

So please take the simple message from this.

Where are you being tested?

What are your unique gifts?

When did you last choose to test yourself?

When did you last choose to test yourself?

Okay, because life will send us enough hardship, but we can also choose to

grow by choosing the circumstances and environments that we place ourselves in.

All right.

Come and say hello on Instagram.

I'm @jdoylespeaks.

You can find me on YouTube, Jonathan Doyle Speaks, and

everything else is on the website, jonathandoyle.co.co.

All right.

Go test yourself.

Here's our final thought for the day: Comfort is fine, but nobody

ever described the best moment of their life as comfortable.

Go and stretch and test yourself.