晨读英语美文100篇 Passage 47 Disrupting My Comfort Zone

[00:00.77]Passage 47 Disrupting My Comfort Zone

[00:07.01]I was 45 years old when I decided to learn how to surf.

[00:11.60]They say that life is tough enough.

[00:13.90]But I guess I like to make things difficult on myself, because I do that all the time.

[00:20.36]Every day and on purpose.

[00:22.87]That's because I believe in disrupting my comfort zone.

[00:27.24]When I started out in the entertainment business,

[00:30.64]I made a list of people that I thought would be good to me.

[00:34.90]Not people who could give me a job or a deal,

[00:38.52]but people who could shake me up, teach me something, challenge my ideas about myself and the world.

[00:46.28]So I started calling up experts in all kinds of fields.

[00:50.44]Some of them were world-famous.

[00:53.50]Of course, I didn't know any of these people and none of them knew me.

[00:58.76]So when I called these people up to ask them for a meeting,

[01:03.13]the response wasn't always friendly.

[01:05.87]And even when they agreed to give me some of their time,

[01:09.48]the results weren't always what one might describe as pleasant.

[01:14.29]Take, for example, Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb.

[01:20.09]It took me a year of begging and more begging to get to him to agree to meet with me.

[01:26.43]And then what happened? He ridiculed me and insulted me.

[01:31.69]But that was okay.

[01:33.44]I was hoping to learn something from him—and I did,

[01:37.16]even if it was only that I'm not that interesting to a physicist with no taste for our pop culture.

[01:44.49]Over the last 30 years, I've produced more than 50 movies and 20 television series.

[01:51.17]I'm successful and, in my business, pretty well known.

[01:56.31]So why do I continue to subject myself to this sort of thing?

[02:00.90]The answer is simple:

[02:02.54]Disrupting my comfort zone, bombarding myself with challenging people and situations

[02:08.56]—this is the best way that I know to keep growing.

[02:12.71]And to paraphrase a biologist I once met,

[02:17.02]if you're not growing, you're dying.

[02:19.40]So maybe I'm not the best surfer on the north shore, but that's okay.

[02:24.53]The discomfort, the uncertainty, the physical and mental challenge that I get from this

[02:31.43]—all the things that too many of us spend our time and energy trying to avoid

[02:37.78]—they are precisely the things that keep me in the game.