There are real ways in which certain types of discomfort are useful, but many organizations have completely perverted this into "all discomfort builds character."
-To improve rapidly at a skill, you have to practice at the edge of your abilities. If you're a decent writer you're not going to improve by mindlessly writing what you already know for hours on end. Only the time you spend challenging yourself really counts.
-There's a decent amount of evidence that being surrounded by wealth triggers laziness. That is, if your office has opulent wooden desks, high-end art, etc., that sends signals along the lines of "conserve the resources we already have." While if your surroundings are a little messy it triggers an instinct to work hard and gain more resources. The Talent Code goes into detail on this. Note that all that matters here is appearance-this doesn't mean that you'll get more performance by giving your employees crappy computers, it means you'll be better off if your office looks spartan.
As long as a company only promotes "discomfort" in these two elements, that can actually be a good thing. But when you get to the point of physical discomfort, that's almost certainly a negative.
That's really interesting. You're absolutely right on the first point. The issue is more of one where a corporate environment with prevailing discomfort discourages the high-end deliberate practice, because people don't want any more risk or pain. As for the second, this is the first time I've heard about it, but it makes a lot of sense.
-To improve rapidly at a skill, you have to practice at the edge of your abilities. If you're a decent writer you're not going to improve by mindlessly writing what you already know for hours on end. Only the time you spend challenging yourself really counts.
-There's a decent amount of evidence that being surrounded by wealth triggers laziness. That is, if your office has opulent wooden desks, high-end art, etc., that sends signals along the lines of "conserve the resources we already have." While if your surroundings are a little messy it triggers an instinct to work hard and gain more resources. The Talent Code goes into detail on this. Note that all that matters here is appearance-this doesn't mean that you'll get more performance by giving your employees crappy computers, it means you'll be better off if your office looks spartan.
As long as a company only promotes "discomfort" in these two elements, that can actually be a good thing. But when you get to the point of physical discomfort, that's almost certainly a negative.