Lately, I haven’t been training as hard as I should be. Actually, to be honest, I’m not doing anything as well as I should be; I’m not as productive as I’d like to be, I’m not reading as much as I’d like to, and I’m not eating as well as I’d like to.

Determined to get myself into better shape – hockey season’s been over for the past 3 months or so, and I haven’t done as much as I’d like to to have kept myself in shape – I bought a pair of new running shoes on Sunday and went running (well, sprinting) yesterday.

What happened? Before every set of sprints, I was consumed by fear. I was feeling the pain of running in advance. I was nervous – not because I was worried that I wouldn’t perform well, but because I knew that, in order to grow and get faster, I was going to have to run. Which meant that I’d have to go through pain; my lungs would burn while my legs would be begging me to stop. Even though I knew that I had to run and go through the pain, I tried to stop myself. I tried holding myself back.

Pain Leads to Growth

With the idea of “lifehacks” – small, easy changes that, once implemented, can boost your results in a big way – becoming more prevalent, I’ve been shying away from pushing my comfort zone. Since I read Tim Ferriss’s The Four Hour Body I’ve been a proponent of training smarter, not harder — and I typically advocate this approach in the rest of life as well.

But I’m coming to the realization that, even if you cut all the corners possible by “working smart” instead of working hard, you still will have to work actively to break away from your comfort zone in order to experience real, lasting growth.

With lifehacks and working smart, you can make tremendous gains quickly because you’re replacing the things you’re doing wrongly with the correct, most efficient method. In essence, you learn how to do things the “right” way. This is analogous to learning the correct technique in a sport.

However, learning the correct technique on its own isn’t good enough. Unless you challenge yourself, your results will not improve much, even when you’re working “smart”. If you’re not reaching toward progression, you will regress, even if you’re doing things the “smart” way.

Put another way: by working smart, you’re going to achieve growth relative to your previous inefficient ways. But notice that no one tells you how to improve beyond working smart, and it’s not because there isn’t a way to grow beyond that; I’ve been training “smart” for the past couple of months, but I still have some serious improvement to do.

You grow beyond just working smart by working smart and hard. You have to push your limits while working smart in order to achieve your true potential.

What makes the idea of working smart so compelling to so many people is that they feel like they don’t have to work hard anymore to push their comfort zones to see improvement. That’s false. Even when you’re working smart, you can always improve by working harder, by pushing your comfort zone, and feeling some pain. Working smart shouldn’t make you fail-proof, it should only make you fail more spectacularly as you try new things at an advanced level — and crash and burn along the way.

The pain associated with failure and breaking free from your comfort zone is worth it, though: your performance, almost without exception (unless you overtrain) will improve over time, and the pain will be worth it.

Instead of resisting the pain, embrace it. It’s only temporary.

So, go, my readers. Reading this post won’t make you experience any pain.

Go do something that will.