Growth and comfort can’t ride the same horse.

Why Growth and Comfort Can’t Ride the Same Horse

by Gary Schneeberger

February 25, 2025

I’m a big fan of quote books – volumes that collect the insightful, instructive sayings of famous people and everyday people alike. Among my collection are utterances worth remembering from Winston Churchill, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan.

I have one called Classic Wisdom for the Good Life that features insights from everyone from American Founding Father John Adams to Superman film star Christopher Reeve. I even have a license to quote from The Wit and Wisdom of James Bond. And, of course, there’s a special spot on my bookshelf for gold standard of the genre, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.

One of the things you may have noticed from our Beyond the Crucible podcast is that I frequently, in my role as cohost, during episodes that are discussions with Warwick about a key truth for bouncing forward from a crucible, roll out some quotes to illustrate a point we’re trying to make.

And by now, more than 250 episodes into the show, we could publish our own book with some of the brilliant perspectives from the guests we’ve interviewed. One such example just came from Dr. Margie Warrell, whom we recently talked to about her new book, The Courage Gap. I’ve been rolling it around in my mind since she said it because it speaks to such a profound truth about what it takes to turn a trial into a triumph:

“Growth and comfort can’t ride the same horse.”

Margie unpacked it during the show as the need to reset our relationship with discomfort and convert our fear into a potent catalyst for action. By practicing what she calls the “one-brave-minute” rule, we are able to summon the courage to step forward, strengthening our neural pathways with each successive step, growing progressively more comfortable with being uncomfortable.

It made me think about why what she said struck me as so empoweringly true. Three thoughts occurred to me.

1. Comfort can often be what keeps us tangled up in the aftermath of our crucible.

We talk a lot at Beyond the Crucible, on the podcast and in writings like this one, about “the pit” we can find ourselves in when setback and failure knock us down. That pit, we and our podcast guests have said, is a painful place that seems both unbearable and inescapable.

What we don’t talk about as much, but which is just as true, is that the pit, however tortuous it may be, can feel safe in a twisted way. When we’ve grown accustomed to living under the heavy weight of our crucible, there can be a very real, very tempting pull stay there. It’s hell, but it’s also “home.”

This was true for me in my crucible of being caught in the grip of alcoholism in my early 30s. The disease had cost me friends, respect, a job – but it also had also given me what I thought was my identity. My friends liked me when I was drunk, I reasoned. Being inebriated allowed me to be me – outgoing, gregarious, funny. As many problems as it caused me, it nonetheless felt as though I’d lose the essence of what was good about me, too is I abandoned the bottle. The pit offered me what felt like protection for my personality.

But as I tentatively began to climb out of it, I realized how not just untrue, but foolish, that thinking was. I began to venture out sober with many of my friends – and I soon found they not only still liked me, but, more importantly, were happy for me as I continued to put healthy distance between me and my crucible.

That’s true regardless of what your crucible is. Breaking the emotional hold it has on you – the idea that the pit is better for you than doing the work you need to accomplish to climb out of it – is a lie. Don’t live it.

2. Comfort can breed a false sense of having overcome a crucible.

At the other end of the spectrum, we can wear comfort as evidence that we’re moved past our struggles. The pit doesn’t become “safe,” we just trick ourselves into believing it’s not a pit at all. We forsake the notion that we have experienced something that’s changed the trajectory of our life by believing that we’ve gotten back on track without doing the work required to not just move away from our crucible, but truly beyond it.

Two times before I entered rehab to truly commit to battling my drinking demons, I explored what treatment looked like but never embraced it. Once, I saw a psychiatrist a couple of times, then walked away believing I wasn’t as bad off as a thought. Another time I visited a rehabilitation hospital in the middle of the night at the bequest of a friend who drove me there, but I never went in or even knocked on the door.

In both instances, I talked myself out of getting help because I talked myself into thinking I didn’t really need it. I leaned into the comfortable familiarity of my alcohol consumption and concluded I was OK. I wasn’t, but I was still comfortable enough to not really stare the need for growth and the opportunity to experience it in the eyes. I was, I concluded, just fine as is.

3. Growth is the only elixir that can propel you beyond your crucible.

If I’ve learned anything as the communications director for the brand Beyond the Crucible and as the cohost of the podcast Beyond the Crucible, it’s the truth of the statement above. There is no way to get from setback to significance without growth. You have to do, as Warwick often says, the critical soul work: reflecting on your crucible, the loss it left you with and the lessons it’s taught you about how to move forward. In the simplest possible terms, you can’t grow without talking those steps.

I close every podcast with some variation of these words: “We know how difficult and painful crucibles can be. But we also know that if you learn the lessons of them and apply those lessons moving forward, it’s not the end of your story. In fact, it can be the start of the greatest new chapter in your story, one that leads you to the best destination of all: a life of significance.”

And even when you arrive there, when you have experienced the healing and hope of walking in your gifts and passions pursuing a calling dedicated to serving others, it remains true that that comfort and growth can’t ride the same horse. Because crucibles, like the hiccups, can always return – and often do. In most cases in a different form, accompanied by different circumstances, but having moved beyond one crucible does not make you immune to another. I haven’t had a drink in nearly 28 years, but I’ve had plenty of other personal and professional life-rattling crucibles in that time.

The best way to keep yourself prepared to avoid or bounce back more quickly from a subsequent trial is not to rest in the distracted comfort of believing the road before you is absolutely devoid of potholes. Instead, press into what your earlier crucible taught you about yourself, the growth it’s granted you in your wisdom and resilience, and be ever-ready to dial them up as needed.

Because you and the growth you’ve internalized not only can ride the same horse, they must.