Pain is information. It tells us that something’s not right. Our reaction to pain is often to stop doing what we’re doing: touch a hot pan, feel shooting pain, take your hand off the pan.
Insulating yourself from pain or friction or conflict robs you of the information that comes along with it.
A smooth ride is a tradeoff. Good shocks on your car give you a smooth ride, but they also mean you don’t feel how bumpy the road is.
A cup of coffee in the morning might help you get work done when you haven’t had enough sleep, but it also subtly encourages you to value sleep less. It helps you ignore what’s essentially pain: Your body’s telling you that you should sleep. Chronic sleep deprivation has worse and less obvious effects than the one-night effects that a cup of coffee solves.
When you test your customers’ interest in your new features only every six months, you’re again avoiding pain. You defer finding out whether they’ll actually use those features for those six months. (Sure, you can ask them what they want. Good luck with that.) Unwilling to fail fast, you get the pain of being wrong way later than you might have, and then it tends to be larger.
I want to protect my kid from pain, large and small. I often see when he’s about to fall or about to fail, or when he does fail. When the stakes are low and my mind is clear, I’ll let him fail. A scraped knee is a lesson. When I deprive him of the information that comes with bumps and scrapes and knocked-over block towers, I do him harm.
Dear reader: Where do you have a smooth ride right now? What kinds of bumps are you being insulated from? Might there be long-term consequences of those bumps that you’re not seeing?
When was the last time you scraped your knee?
