The Power of Being (Un)comfortable
I’ve recently moved from Porto (Portugal) to Manchester (UK) to do a Masters in Digital Media Management at Hyper Island.
I’ve considered taking a Master for a long time, but in my head going back to school meant sitting through classes all day, and memorizing endless amounts of information to ‘deposit’ on an exam. Or even worse: having to write a thesis on something I couldn’t care less about. This made me feel bored and uninterested. Despite all this, I was sure that if I decided to go this direction, I knew what to expect and how I reacted to it. I would be comfortable.
Right now, around 4 months after I decided to apply for Hyper Island and exactly 1 month after I started a Masters program at the same school, my perception of being a student and about education, in general, has changed. At Hyper Island, you never know what you’ll be doing the next day. You might be working on a 2 days (or two 2 hours!) brief, building lego structures, working 29 other people with your eyes folded, collaborating with a client based in Buenos Aires, or who-knows-what-they-will-come-up-with-next-time. This definitely does not make me feel bored or uninterested. This makes me feel happy, fulfilled and constantly uncomfortable.
Yes, you got it right, I just listed “uncomfortable” as a good thing.
During the last month, I’ve felt uncomfortable every day, multiple times a day, in a place that I can now call home. ‘Uncomfortable’ isn’t an adjective you would normally associate with the noun ‘home’, so what is the reason for this strange combination? Why is being uncomfortable so powerful that it made me feel at home? After giving it some thought, I came up with three answers for these questions:
1. You accomplish a lot more while uncomfortable
It’s amazing to look back and see the number of new experiences I’ve had in just one month. This meant shaking off that gloomy thought of “Really? Another challenge? Can you give us a break??” many times, but I’m glad I did it.
Every time I’ve set myself to be uncomfortable, amazing and unpredictable things happened — sometimes they were great things, other times #shithappened and I learned.
On the second day at Hyper Island, we were introduced to The Learning Spiral.
This spiral never ends. This framework makes you feel uncomfortable by constantly asking you ‘how did this experience affect you?’, ‘how did you feel when that happened?’, ‘what can you learn from it?’, ‘how are you going to apply those learning next time?’. There’s never a moment when you can say ‘great, I’m done with this learning thing, now I can sit back and enjoy my caipirinha’. This forces you to constantly be aware of the experiences you’re going through and of ways to improve. This can only lead to big things in the future.
2. When you’re uncomfortable you can’t stop thinking about it
Two days ago, during a very interesting talk at Hyper Island, Mike Press, mentioned a book called ‘The Chimp Paradox’. The author of this book argues that when faced with a new situation, everyone has one of three reactions: freeze, flee or fight. I think these are the exact same options we have when feeling uncomfortable.
When you’re uncomfortable you can’t stop thinking about it, ‘why do I have to do this?’, ‘can I just sit here quietly?’, ‘this process is confusing, I can just do what I’m used to doing?’, so we’re constantly faced with the choice to freeze, flee or fight. I’ve been making the conscient decision to fight at all times and this keeps me moving forward and motivated.
3. It’s addictive
When you’re about to do something new you feel like you’re going to jump off a cliff. It’s like doing bungee jumping (but physically safer — I hope). It’s the feeling of taking a step ahead, taking control of your own fear and facing the unknown. And like all adrenaline sports, this is addictive.
This addiction comes from the feeling of relief after you’ve opened ‘door number 2’ and saw that nothing is as bad as you thought it was. This makes you want to look the unknown in the eye and open as many doors as you can!
I might just sound like (or be!) an obsessive addict with high hopes for the future, but I seriously believe that being uncomfortable is ok, being uncomfortable is good. This is the only way we can move onwards and upwards. Writing this article made me feel uncomfortable and that makes me happy.
Before closing up this post, I would like to thank all the 60 other people that embraced this adventure with me. THANK YOU! ❤ #crewuk #dmm7dxd2 #hyperislanduk
Sara
This post is part of a promise I’ve made to myself to start a blog. ‘Enough planning! Go for it! Prototype, test, fail, repeat, remember?’. I decided to finally do it to celebrate my first month at Hyper Island. I do realise this isn’t the best-written piece you’ve ever read, so thank you for reading, you rock!
