An oil driller was excited that the oil property he had just purchased had good prospects. He went to his wife and broke the good news, but she was not happy, “Honey, can’t you drill somewhere near so the commute would not be so long?”
The fundamental and obvious principle of drilling for oil is, “You got to drill where the oil is, not where you want it to be.”
It may seem obvious but yet we are unable to take this principle to heart. We all make the mistake of trying to look for stuff where we want it to be:
- When hunting for a job, instead of going where the jobs are, we look for them in our neighborhood. This causes our career to stagnate.
- Instead of building skills what the market or employer demands, we tend to build skills in areas where we are most comfortable. Our inability to go out of our comfort zone causes our progress to slow down.
- In business, instead of understanding what the customer needs, we try to provide the customer what we can or based on our own preferences. This is the reason why most businesses struggle.
- In our spiritual quest, we prefer to look for spiritual experience in the context of our ego, instead of outside it. Consequently most of us have difficulty making spiritual progress.
Just outside our comfort zone, lies growth and success. But this is scary and difficult, yet this is where we must go. This quote summarizes the insight of this post well:
“The best piece of advice someone has ever given me was ‘do it scared.’ And no matter if you’re scared, just go ahead and do it anyway because you might as well do it scared, so it will get done and you will feel so much better if you step out of your comfort zone.” – Sherri Shepherd
Related: Five Secrets Of Your Comfort Zone
Credits: This has been written by Raj Shah and edited by Ketna Shah