On Being Uncomfortable: Why I Keep Choosing Hard Things

I have been uncomfortable for most of the past four years. Not in the abstract motivational-poster sense - I mean the specific feeling of being in a situation I am not equipped for yet, where I do not have the vocabulary or the skills or the context, and where the gap between where I am and where I need to be is visible and embarrassing. I have made a habit of choosing these situations deliberately. I think it is the right decision. I am still not sure.

What Deliberate Discomfort Looks Like

I moved from Ghana to the UK with a General Arts background and enrolled in an Electronic Engineering and Computer Science degree. I had no physics beyond secondary school level and no mathematics beyond WAEC. I chose the hardest available entry route into a field I did not yet belong in. The first semester was the most intellectually painful experience I have had. I understood about 40% of what was taught and faked the rest.

I have applied for programmes and awards I was underqualified for. Some I did not get. Some I got and then had to grow into quickly. I entered a hackathon before I could build anything worth entering a hackathon with. I submitted pull requests to open source projects before I understood the codebases. In each case the experience of being in the room or in the review process taught me things I would not have learned by waiting until I was ready.

The Mechanism

I think discomfort works as a learning accelerant because it forces attention. When you are comfortable, your brain is on autopilot - pattern-matching to existing schemas, spending as little energy as possible. When you are uncomfortable, the pattern-matching fails and you have to actually engage with what is in front of you. The engagement is costly in the moment. It compounds into skill over time.

There is also a calibration effect. Until you attempt something, your estimate of the difficulty is based on observation from the outside. From the outside, most things look harder than they are. Attempting them reveals that they are merely hard - not impossible, not reserved for some other category of person. This recalibration changes what you are willing to attempt next. The things that seemed impossible become the new baseline.

The Difference Between Discomfort and Overwhelm

There is a meaningful distinction between productive discomfort and overwhelm. Productive discomfort is being in a situation where you are stretched but functional - confused about specific things, not everything. Overwhelm is the feeling of being unable to identify where to start, where every direction looks equally unfamiliar and scary. Overwhelm produces paralysis, not learning.

The practical difference is the size of the gap. A gap you can see the other side of - where you know roughly what skills you lack and roughly how to get them - is generative. A gap with no visible far side is demoralising. I have been in both. Getting out of overwhelm requires narrowing the problem: pick one specific thing that is unclear, address only that, then expand. The instinct to solve everything at once is the problem.

What This Costs

Choosing difficulty is not free. It costs time - you cannot learn everything at the same pace if you are constantly reaching past your current level. It costs social capital - being visibly inexperienced in rooms where others are not is uncomfortable in ways that compound. And it costs confidence, at least in the short term. You spend enough time being the least experienced person in the room and you start to wonder if you should be there at all.

The answer to the last question is almost always yes. The people who belong in rooms are not always the most experienced. They are the ones who have something to contribute - a perspective, an effort, an approach - and who do not leave when the first question they cannot answer reveals their limits. Limits are temporary. Presence is the variable that matters.

Why I Think It Is Right

I am not sure I would make different choices. The discomfort of not knowing how to do something has consistently been followed by knowing how to do it. The embarrassment of being wrong in front of people has consistently been followed by not making the same mistake. The anxiety of being evaluated at a level above my current ability has, more often than not, been followed by reaching that level faster than I expected.

I do not think this is about resilience as a personality trait, or some particular capacity for tolerating pain. I think it is about having a very clear picture of where you want to be and being willing to be embarrassed in the service of getting there. The discomfort is not the point. The destination is.

Further Reading

1. 01.Mindset: The New Psychology of Success - Carol Dweck - the research behind growth vs fixed mindset
2. 02.The Courage to Be Disliked - Kishimi and Koga - Adlerian psychology applied to self-determination
3. 03.Paul Graham: Keep Your Identity Small (2009)
4. 04.The Pragmatic Programmer - Hunt and Thomas - chapter on your knowledge portfolio