You Need Adventure for Growth
How are you pushing your comfort zone?
Your comfort zone is the space you’re sitting in right now. It’s the status quo. It’s a natural and necessary phenomenon, but if you’re only operating within that space, you’ll have results only consistent with what you already have.
Adventure that gets us outside our comfort zone is necessary for growth. In order to maximize your potential you have to consistently do things that push the edge. I don’t care what kind of things, but that willingness to break out of your comfort zone will seep into every area of your business not to mention your life.
Take Walmart’s Chairman of the Walmart Board of Directors, Greg Penner. This guy climbed Mt. Everest, the tallest mountain in the world, just over a year ago. Quite an adventure he was embarking on.
It wasn’t a smooth trip. Almost to the top about half of their oxygen regulators failed, a very dangerous situation. According to Greg it was like flying in an airplane at cruising altitude, when suddenly the cabin depressurizes, and the oxygen masks don’t work. Naturally, the team quickly descended 7,000 feet to the safety of camp and prepared to head home.
But over breakfast the next morning, they started to think about the six months of training -- how hard they had worked, how close they came, and whether there was any possible way to make another attempt. They talked through a strategy, cobbled together the oxygen, and decided to make a run at it. Two days later, the Walmart flag was on top of the world.
And you better believe that that resilience, that willingness to do hard things, take those adventures -- not only helped him to be an effective chairman of one of the largest companies in the world, but translates into the Walmart culture.
Following Greg’s climb, Walmart posted a 300B dollar company increase in their share price, almost 20%, in just 6 months. They’ve gone on to be testing touchless checkout, host summer movies in many of their parking lots and partner with Shopify to compete with Amazon.
I don’t think because Greg climbed Everest their stock price went up (if that was the case we’d all be climbing). I do think because Greg was the kind of person willing to climb Everest, that willingness to grow, try new things and push the boundaries translated to everyone he was around. It became part of the culture.
One of my favorite things to do is to go on an adventure that pushes my own comfort zone. Even better when we get to do it with some executives as part of a breakthrough workshop. But you don’t need me for it. How are you pushing your comfort zone? Not just as a business, but you as an individual. As you can embrace adventure, your business will no doubt benefit.
The question is: what adventure are you on?