Farrah Storr on how a 'discomfort mindset' leads to success

I remember the day I graduated clearly: Royal Festival Hall. A flock of mortar boards thrown high into the sky above the Thames. Our egos fat with delusions of promise. Our promise. We were kids reared at the tail end of the Eighties, the dawning of our now fully amped-up, neo-liberal times. ‘Work hard, be confident, identify what you want and it will come your way,’ was the message. And it really was ‘the’ message: from our parents, from our schools and from our culture.

I wanted to be a writer and though there was little to suggest I had any real talent, I believed I would slip out of university and land, swan-like, into a job. I did not.

Instead the weekend job I had taken to get me through university (that of ‘supporting’ door bitch at a rowdy private members’ club) became my full-time role. I did the night shift, 6pm until… well until the last punter roared out of the door at around 5am. By day I would intern at glossy magazines, making tea, doing photocopies, desperately trying to be liked and noticed. I scoured job boards, newspaper ads and listened intently to conversations, hoping to catch a scent of a job vacancy in the wind. I must have applied for more than 50 jobs that year. I had one interview.

In the quietest times at the club, usually between 3 and 4am, I would sit in the windowsill behind reception, with its view across all of Soho. Soho was a different place then. Uber had not yet flushed out the mini cab drivers who would patiently wait in the doorways that ran across Old Compton and Greek Streets. (I will forever be grateful to ‘Fred’, a driver who, knowing I could only afford the notorious number 3 night bus home, instead volunteered to drive me every night for just a couple of pounds. His motive: only fatherly protectiveness.) There were quarrelling lovers and drug dealers with their hoods held high. There were the homeless men and women, ‘cows’ the dealers would call them, who would trail behind, wide-eyed and docile. And all the while I could hear the laughter and carefree chatter of successful people at work in the club around me. Had they known hardship? Had they tasted struggle? Did they know what it felt like to be rejected again and again? In the dramatic manner in which all twenty-somethings like to play out their lives, I decided only I knew that.

They say it takes a lifetime to write your first book and it is true. First books are born from ideas you carry around in your head for years, finessing and questioning over decades of lived experience. In many ways the seeds of my book, The Discomfort Zone, were sown all the way back in 2001. It was back then, sitting on that windowsill, that I became aware of the gulf that exists between truly successful people (in a professional sense, no more) and everyone else. What makes them stand out? How do they get the breaks in life? Was it down to luck, networking and the castors of confidence that good breeding encourages? Or was it something else? Did failure, struggle and obstacles touch their lives? Did rejection? Did constraint? And so for the past three years I set about finding out, interviewing those at the very top of their game: gold-medal-winning athletes, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, those at the summit of the worlds of dance, public life and corporations.

Those I interviewed came from different backgrounds and varying corners of the world (though interestingly all had known ‘struggle’ at an early age) and yet were all united by one thing: a ‘discomfort mindset’. These were people who pushed themselves out of their comfort zones day in day out. They faced struggle head-on. They were not afraid of failure. They realised that uncomfortable, critical feedback was friend not foe and that great success came about because of obstacles not in spite of them.

They are not alone. The brilliance we see in the world around us has all been touched by discomfort. Jaws’ famous two-note film score became iconic after Steven Spielberg was forced to lean on it to denote his protagonist lurking in the water after the huge mechanical shark he wanted to use malfunctioned at the beginning of filming. The multi-award winning architect Frank Gehry, meanwhile, said the only time he couldn’t design a building was when he had zero constraints in which to work.

The truth is this: the human body and mind is made for discomfort. Put us under pressure and we do not, as the current cultural message suggests, break. We get stronger. Ultra-runners develop bigger hearts than your average person while elite dancers and pianists have feet and fingers that can move in almost superhuman ways. When we throw ourselves into tough situations the human condition responds by being even tougher. And yet… we live in a time of unprecedented coddling. Ours has become a culture in which we incubate our children from harm: no more conkers in the playground, no more red pen for marking homework, no more snowball fights or games of ‘tig’ or even, as I recently heard, ‘best friends’ at school, for fear the fall-out of breaking up will cause too much distress.

We live in a time when our universities, once institutions of challenge and discomfort, are now hell-bent on turning themselves into giant crèches with cosy ‘safe spaces’ and lecturers who must counsel against literature that may offend or trigger feelings of discomfort. (So long, The Great Gatsby, with your hints of domestic abuse. Farewell Lolita, your 400-odd pages of paedophiliac nonsense. Both books I loved and studied.) We even do it to ourselves, incubating our lives and thoughts from harm by choosing to exist in an online bubble where we need only ever brush up against those whose opinions and views of the world chime with our own. And it is our loss.

Discomfort, whether through failure, obstacles or exposure to diverse and sometimes uncomfortable thought, is essential. It is the only way to stretch and grow. It is also the only way to see who you really are and what true strength you have lined up deep within you. (The answer: usually much more than you first reckoned.) But it is also about even more than that. Getting comfortable with discomfort is about getting comfortable with life. Happiness and success are fleeting, joyous moments. When you get them you lap them up, but you do so knowing they don’t last for long. Most of life is the challenge to reach those moments, so you have to make peace with that. But you also have to know that happiness can come from those very things. There is immense satisfaction in pushing yourself into the face of challenge and even greater joy when you realise you have the strength to do it. I am at the top of my profession now. I am the editor-in-chief of a major women’s magazine. It is a fine life, but it is never comfortable. Every day throws discomfort my way — the difference is I do not shield myself from it, I throw myself into it.

Just a few months ago, as a sort of gift to myself, I joined the club where I once worked all those years ago. It’s all changed now of course, but the windowsill where I used to sit is still there, masked now behind a dining room table. Every time I see it, I smile. I smile knowing that 2001 was the year that built me. And I smile knowing that the laughter and carefree chatter of the successful people all around is not because their lives have been untouched by discomfort. But because they have.

‘The Discomfort Zone: How to Get What You Want by Living Fearlessly’ by Farrah Storr (Piatkus, £14.99) is out now

Illustrations by Joe McLaren