"Each day of not writing, of comfort, of being that which he despised, dulled his ability and softened his will to work so that, finally, he did no work at all."..."They had made this safari with the minimum of comfort. There was no hardship; but there was no luxury and he had thought that he could get back into training that way. That in some way he could work the fat off his soul the way a fighter went into the mountains to work and train in order to burn it out of his body."..."He had destroyed his talent by not using it, by betrayals of himself and what he believed in, by drinking so much that he blunted the edge of his perceptions, by laziness, by sloth, and by snobbery, by pride and by prejudice, by hook and by crook."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, when writing Antifragile, writes:
"Many, like the great Roman statesman Cato the Censor, looked at comfort, almost any form of comfort, as a road to waste. He did not like it when we had it too easy, as he worried about the weakening of the will."..."Cato would have smiled hearing about the recently observed effect in aeronautics that the automation of airplanes is under-challenging pilots, making flying too comfortable for them, dangerously comfortable. The dulling of the pilot's attention and skills from too little challenge is indeed causing deaths from flying accidents."
These ideas bring up the question... how do we maintain our edge? How to we realise our full potential? By being led by our passion? By being pushed along by the prospect of doing something before our slowly creeping death? By removing our comforts?
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