I came across this article from 2018 and it really spoke to me as a late-diagnosed autistic only just learning what “comfortable” feels like.
Balance needs to be established between being in the comfort zone and leaving it. If i stayed in my comfort zone all day (my room) then my mental health would start to suffer but leaving the zone for too long also has that effect.
In that case, it is my impression, that your comfort zone is actually the balance between staying in your room and going out, maybe?
Your comfort zone is BAD because it doesn’t make MONEY for ME. --typical boss mentality
There is an appropriate time and place for one to leave their comfort zone and this differs for everyone. The advice levelled at people telling them to leave their comfort zone, is at best, tine deaf.
I agree. As an entrepreneur, I have exactly one time where I leave my comfort zone: if it benefits the people I care about, be it loved ones, friends, communities.
The big issue I see with companies these days is that they’re not trying hard enough to be fair: If you are willing to put in extra effort, I will put in extra effort myself. Companies can achieve that through money and other benefits or whatever the person favors.
We have come to accept that your boss makes a dollar while you make a penny (not even a dime).
I always tell people (even those who worked for me) that you put in as much effort as the other side does. Worked out well for us all.
Mind if I ask if you have any advice for an aspiring entrepreneur? I had an electronics project that I tried to get off the ground. I managed to teach myself what I needed, but I’m stumped by lack of funding, time, and an aversion to the social aspects. I figure I need to find cofounders who can take on that work, but no one I know has the time, and few if any have the skills. Plus as a self-taught electronics designer, I can’t ignore a concern that there could easily be a major mistake that’ll affect reliability/lifespan of whatever I produce.
I have ideas in varying stages for electronics and software. Not many I’ve started on, but a few I’ve at least started basic planning for.
Sure dude. Sounds like you might have gotten a gray hair or two already dealing with this stuff, prepare for more.
Being an entrepreneur is very hard. It begins rough and doesn’t ever become easier. You just get used to it. One reason why most long time owners are pretty rough around the edges.
First of all: I don’t know how to make a multi person start up work. I did it on my own and employed people instead of searching for partner. Partners were what nearly brought me down.
Thad said, I would probably start with a business plan. Thats what I always do and have done for others as well. Most plans have holes. Writing a business plan uncovers those.
Then you let someone with experience look it over. A tax specialist, a lawyer, someone who knows sales and marketing. Let them poke holes in it, be thankful and go back to the drawing room. Repeat until nobody can poke holes.
At this point you will be feeling like multiple cars ran you over. It’s devastating but if you can stand up after every grueling feedback, your plan and you are ready for war.
Never let anyone you would not trust with your life touch or see it except the mentioned specialists.
Then you start talking to people about your finished idea and see if people want to work with you.
If not, you go to a bank (probably multiple) and pitch your idea. Again, be prepared for gang**pe style feedback and grow with it.
Ultimately someone will trust you. Think of the inventors in history. They ran around with their idea and got thrown out 99 times before someone believed them.
So, welcome to the world of entrepreneurs. Yes, we are insane. If you want to join, you need to become insane as well. Good luck. :)
Apologies for deleting my comment, it seemed a bit out of place but I'm glad you responded. I managed to recover the deleted text, so I'll put that in a spoiler here.
Mind if I ask if you have any advice for an aspiring entrepreneur? I had an electronics project that I tried to get off the ground. I managed to teach myself what I needed, but I’m stumped by lack of funding, time, and an aversion to the social aspects. I figure I need to find cofounders who can take on that work, but no one I know has the time, and few if any have the skills. Plus as a self-taught electronics designer, I can’t ignore a concern that there could easily be a major mistake that’ll affect reliability/lifespan of whatever I produce.
I have ideas in varying stages for electronics and software. Not many I’ve started on, but a few I’ve at least started basic planning for.
Thanks, listing out some specific experts to talk to and describing the overall process is helpful! I suppose I’ll need to return to that project and work out the remaining bugs, revisit my business plan, talk with some consultants, and then look into funding. Given that my project requires custom-manufactured hardware, the upfront cost could be eye wateringly high, potentially > $100k if I needed to start generating revenue quickly.
Sounds like you might have gotten a gray hair or two already dealing with this stuff, prepare for more.
It was definitely a challenging few years, between that and everything else going on in my life. I don’t mind hard work. I’d rather spend my time doing something meaningful to me than working on whatever a manager dictates I should do. I do need time to relax and recharge, but there’s nothing saying I can’t do both.
Partners were what nearly brought me down.
Could you expand on that a little? I’ve been looking for partners because I’ve come to understand that certain tasks burn me out quickly, which leads me to think one or more partners will need to take on those tasks in my case. Did you have a bad experience with a partnership? Couldn’t find anyone who was competent and interested?
It’s hard to find examples of autistic entrepreneurs, and neurodiverse-friendly resources for starting a business are hard to find online. If you were so inclined, I think sharing your experience in a book/website could help a lot of aspiring innovators. (How did you research? What business structures have you tried? What roadblocks did you hit/what solutions did you find that worked for you? How was your experience convincing people to trust/work with you?, etc.)
Glad you find it helpful.
Expanding on the partnership thing:
I initially played with the idea of taking on partners but after some discussions with people I met over time I decided to change my approach.
So I designed the company in a way that makes my personal limits less of a problem. For instance, I coded a custom crm from the ground up. That was because I couldn’t afford a secretary at the time and I made the necessary paperwork come out in one click instead of filling out templates all the time. I also integrated basic bookkeeping so I don’t need to buy and learn more proprietary software. There are a lot of other functions I automated and put in.
So, after avoiding partners initially, I took on someone who used to be a successful employee of mine before. Long story short, they found a flaw in our contracts and took off with like 50k $ and caused roughly a quarter million in damages in the process, not counting me burning out due to the stress.
And in the 10 years of being an entrepreneur, I‘ve heard a vast majority of peers tell me similar stories. The issue is trust. If you are able to not really trust someone you are around all day, that might help but I surely cant. And I think it also hinders progress. Imho, the most successful partnerships happen because people are either equally naive or equally antitrust. The chance of meeting a match is even less likely and infinitely more dangerous than finding your soulmate.
For that reason, I won’t ever search for partners. I either do consulting, being paid for it or employ/contract people who get paid for their work and not having any say in the company itself.
Let me know if you have any more questions. :)
So I designed the company in a way that makes my personal limits less of a problem…
Interesting. It sounds to me like you used your strengths to streamline your process such that your limits don’t come up as much. By working towards solutions that accommodated your limits, you built software that would make life easier for anyone (provided they can figure out the software). The same approach would probably work well for me.
they found a flaw in our contracts and took off with like 50k [+250k in damages]
Ah, that would make me hesitant to take on partners too. I’ve had some small setbacks from trusting people, but never quite that much (granted, I’ve never had that much to lose). Sucks you had that happen. Crazy that it was a previously reliable employee who turned on you like that too.
I don’t know that I would be able to work with partners I couldn’t trust. Even if I could keep them at arms length and remain suspicious, the added effort of having to handle that on top of everything else wouldn’t be worth it, not to mention there would be too high of a chance they’d eventually stab me in the back. If it’s a choice between working with someone I can’t trust or trying to go at it alone, working alone is definitely a better choice. I agree with you there. I’ll keep that in mind as I continue working on this problem. If I do look for a business partner, I’d be looking for someone who comes across as unflinchingly transparent, and whose transparency reveals strong integrity and a collaborative spirit.
You lost me at collaborative spirit. I‘m not into big words to be honest but otherwise you nailed it imo.
I‘d say: do it alone as long as you can and then get people to work for you, not with you. They have clear areas of expertise and definitive borders. Make it a sport to find new responsibilities for them and be incredibly fair but don’t let anyone else take the wheel, trust me.
I think those of us (autists) who are able to work at that level are rather gifted and we still struggle with social clues. Even if you have what it takes to run a company, you probably wont see it coming if someone betrays you.
We are the perfect victim to exploitation. I have been exploited a lot in my life (i do have a history of abuse as a child as well). Most people don’t even know that much about themselves.
But I digress. Let me know if you have any more questions.
I agree with the other commenters that you should spend some time outside your comfort zone but pace yourself very carefully. The article mentioned a proximal zone that’s outside but adjacent to the comfort zone. I think it’s good to mostly shoot for that with occasional planned forays further out just to test yourself.
IMO nobody should be telling you when to go outside your comfort zone or how far, or whether you’re doing it enough, unless it’s someone close to you whose opinion you can trust and who you know will hear you out when you say you’re overwhelmed. And even then you still have veto power because you’re the one who has to deal with the fallout if you push yourself too far and melt down or burn out. I don’t ever see any NT folks volunteering to help people clean up their life after that except maybe social workers and therapists.
The flip side of this is that since nobody can tell you how much is too much, you’re responsible for monitoring that yourself and communicating or removing yourself before you get overwhelmed. That’s a good use for the proximal zone - testing your boundaries and keeping an eye on your mood so you can learn to spot when you are approaching your limit. Easier said than done, but I’ve found it worth the effort. And it gets easier with time.
The other thing to recognize is that some days your comfort zone is pretty big and other days it’s about as big as your bed. Asking yourself “how big is my comfort zone today” helps you give yourself some grace. If it’s a bed day and you got out of bed, you already exited your comfort zone and should factor that in when you plan your day.
Too much text so my brain won’t let me read it and thus this might just be a summary of what you said, but
My take is to treat it like exercising muscles, you push as far into discomfort as you can handle (never reaching pain, pain is a sign of damage rather than growth), then you spend a long time resting and recuperating until you feel ready to push it again.
Yes exactly. Apologies for the wordiness.
I think we’re “supposed” to destroy ourselves for the sake of advancement for a few reasons:
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To preserve the myth of Western egalitarianism. Supposedly, we have a classless society. Anyone can make it if they just put in the effort. Mind you, this isn’t true: plenty try and fail, and even those who succeed sacrifice their life to advance from one class to another. But we’re supposed to believe that the only reason we don’t have certain things is because we don’t want it bad enough, and/or lack the discipline to succeed. The goal: get people to always look inward for the source of their suffering, and fail to recognize the very real economic parasitism that prospers at our expense.
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A manifestation of that old but persistent notion that to be righteous is to suffer. If you are happy, if you aren’t suffering, you must be doing something wrong. Good food tastes bad. Good exercise hurts. Good work is miserable. To be good in spirit is to mortify the flesh. Put on your hair shirt, run five miles, drop and give me twenty, and then complete a twelve hour shift. Sleep is for the weak.
What offends people who take this advice more than anything is someone who hasn’t lived this way, and yet is happy when they are not.
I have seen this way to much. The idealistic philosophy that capitalists push tries to tell you that everything that ever happens to you is your doing and in your control. They try to keep your eyes off the bigger picture of what is happening and how each object in a environment interacts. If you play a board game that has dice with these people you will get a front row sit to see this in action. They completely lack the idea of just having fun and instead get really toxic and since they believe they have complete control over the world the idea that parts of the game being up to luck just doesn’t register in there mind. It gets worse when they bring those ideas into real life. When they see a poor person they think the poor person did this to them self even without knowing anything about the poor person. Anyone who does those type of things please do yourself a favor and look at the world as a many small pieces interacting and each playing a role that sums up to bigger events instead of just “the whole world is me” view. Also it isn’t just a nt thing. I have seen nt and nd’s with these views.
I think the main reason people say it is because growth happens during times of discomfort. If you’re only ever comfortable, you’ll become weak and die early because your body will fail faster.
My sister was diagnosed with ASD prior to transitioning, and she went the complete opposite way from the “keep yourself comfortable” mindset.
It can absolutely be fun to be comfortable for a while, but eventually the other shoe will drop and it’s going to lead to misery and deteriorate your mental state.
I have a roommate with ASD that I’ve really been trying to drive this home to, and completely honestly, I feel incredibly guilty like I’m enabling him by allowing him to live with me for cheap without imposing any expectation that he improve himself.
Discomfort stimulates growth, but the actual growth happens during periods of recovery. That is true of the body, and I have little doubt it is true of the mind, as well. I’m not saying people should never step out of their comfort zone. But just like we shouldn’t be judging people at the gym because, from our perspective, they should be able to do more, we should be extending compassion to those of us who have difficulties in the mind, particularly considering we can only know our own perspective, not theirs. I mean, you wouldn’t expect a guy in a wheel chair to be doing leg presses, would you?
Yeah I agree. Getting out of your comfort zone simply conditions yourself to feeling uncomfortable, but simply doing it isn’t going to get you the things that you want. If you tag along as a fifth wheel to parties and stand around but don’t actually like being there, you’re out of your comfort zone but you’re not actually gaining anything. You aren’t going to make friends or find a girlfriend by standing in the corner.
You also need to approach with compassion and I agree that we should moderate our expectation. Someone who has been a shut-in would be making a lot of progress just by going out to a party once.
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I agree that sometimes we have to retreat to comfort and safety. However, when I have had the most success in my life is when I reach outside of my comfort zone. I don’t do it permanently, but I use it as a way to get to the next step. It’s a way to get out of stagnancy or a overcome a lack of social or career momentum.
Almost all those suggestions are typically from and for NT people, and largely do not take into account difficulties the rest of us have.
Best response I can think of to people saying this. “You need to leave my comfort zone.”
