On the other side of discomfort is where the real journey begins.

Every Essay is being written with an album in mind, which is playing at the same time we are writing what you are reading right now, so for full experience we highly recommend going to your music provider and play “Deadbeat” By Tame Impala as you are reading this, promise it’s worth it. Ok back to the topic now!

Creative discomfort shows up in ways you do not always expect.
Sometimes it is a project you avoid, sometimes it’s a new software you do not want to learn, or maybe an environment that simply feels unfamiliar.

It can be small, like choosing different colors, shades, or designs you never dared to explore, and it can be big, like building a collection or releasing an album.

It can also be personal. It meets you in your daily life, in how you interact with society and your peers, be it what you wear, how you express yourself, and even what you happen to listen to right now; because discomfort shows up in music too. (Not the kind where you dislike a genre, but the songs you avoid because they bring back memories you prefer to skip.) Those moments are often the ones you need to revisit if you want to move forward creatively, because once you face them, something shifts.

You unlock a new layer of yourself, and suddenly the path forward becomes clearer. And that is when the real journey begins.

Starting this Substack account was the clearest moment where discomfort made the work better.
Yes, we are fortunate to have many of you tuning in and sharing your thoughts, needless to say super grateful! But there is a part of the creative industry that people do not talk about enough. Once you cross a certain threshold, in our case growing by more than fifteen hundred readers in a week, something shifts inside you. There is suddenly this quiet pressure that the work needs to keep up with the momentum, because you entered a new level in the game, You need to keep creating, keep writing, keep showing up. For some, It is a vulnerable place to be in, and it carries its own version of discomfort, no matter how big or small.

The first step is acknowledging it.
You learn how to navigate it, how to build frameworks, how to build rituals, and how to understand that this feeling is part of growth. It is not something to run from. It is something to face.

So we keep on writing.
We write to make sense of it; to move through the discomfort. We write because the words have value, the projects have value, because every creative act we put into the world is another step in overcoming discomfort and elevating the work itself.

that moment taught us how to stop, reflect, and look at the bigger picture.

It reminded us that this is the game we chose to be a part of. It also made us understand that boundaries are meant to be broken, and that until you face your biggest creative discomforts, you end up making the entire project harder to grow. And you owe it to yourself to ask a simple question. If you think back to your younger days, what changed between then and now that made you believe these discomforts could stop you from doing what you are supposed to do?

It is like having a car stuck in the middle of the desert (Nevada, visualize it) and refusing to change the tire because you have never done it before. We bet you would figure it out. You would push past the discomfort of not knowing. So what is the difference between that car in Nevada and your design, your article, your idea? Nothing. Maybe it is urgency. Maybe it is importance. Maybe it is prioritization or procrastination. It could be all of them.

As long as you identify the feeling and act on it, you can move the project into its next stage; And that is how you return to the reason you started in the first place.

Avoiding discomfort only widens the gap between you and the realization of your projects. remember that car that’s stuck in the middle of Nevada, refusing to move because you never changed a tire before. The longer you wait, the deeper the sun hits, the harder it gets, and nothing changes until you do? Well here comes another metaphor. If you bake a cake and you leave out the yeast or anything that helps it rise, the cake stays flat. So the question becomes simple. Do you want to rise? Discomfort is the yeast! You need it in order to move forward.

So ask yourself. Would you rather be the cake in the local supermarket (no shade) or the cake at Lady M in Bryant Park? The Illy Coffee Matcha Mille Crêpes, 9 inches, going for one hundred and fifteen dollars. Your call.

But on a serious note, avoiding discomfort does not protect you. It pushes you further away from finishing anything that matters. And it does not stop there. It starts to spill into other parts of your life, and that is a different level of impact. Because at that point, we are not talking about a collection or an album. We are talking about your actual life.

So go, Make that one call, push that design out, listen to those lyrics.
Have that conversation you have been avoiding for a long time.

Understand that the only limits inside a project are the ones you place on it. They are not universal and most certainly they are not permanent. Every action you take is shaping the future of your work in real time; So do the thing you know you need to do. Because once you act on it and move past the discomfort, you have already made the best decision you could make.

On the other side of that first uncomfortable step is the beginning of the life you were trying to reach all along.

See you in 48, hopefully you acted on it!