Seeking Discomfort

Why it Matters and How to Build it as a Skill

Before I left for Japan to lead the Nissan turnaround, Louis Schweitzer, then CEO of Renault, asked me one question.

What chances do you give yourself of succeeding?

I said 50%.

He looked at me and answered: if I genuinely believed it was only 50%, I would not send you. I would not bet the future of this company on those odds.

I took the role anyway, and the exchange has stayed with me because of what the decision revealed about how I understand risk.

Discomfort and uncertainty are not reasons to refuse a challenge. In most cases, they should be the signal that the challenge is worth taking.

When the outcome is genuinely uncertain and the stakes are real, you perform at a level you simply cannot reach in comfortable, predictable circumstances.

Nissan in 1999 was a company with 20 billion dollars of debt, a workforce of 130,000 people with no reason to trust a foreign CEO, and a culture that had rationalized its own decline over nearly a decade. I was not Japanese, I did not come from Japan’s automotive industry, and I arrived from a company that most of Nissan’s leadership considered minor. The discomfort was structural, cultural, and personal.

What I understood quickly was that these were advantages. Indeed, insiders had explanations for everything, outdated perspectives, and roles that depended on the status quo. Seeing clearly through all of that required a perspective that only an outsider can bring.

Seeking that discomfort, rather than avoiding it, is what keeps bringing the right opportunities for growth.

When I asked skeptical Japanese managers to fly to Romania and Slovenia to see how women ran our plants there, I was asking them to be uncomfortable. Eastern European industrial culture had normalized women in senior factory roles for decades. Those managers arrived skeptical and came back convinced, because they had seen it with their own eyes. That trip changed them in ways that a presentation about gender quotas in a boardroom never could have.

The most important decisions in a career are almost always the most uncomfortable ones. The 50% odds conversation with Schweitzer. The decision to dismantle the keiretsu in front of a skeptical executive board. The choice to bring Mitsubishi into the Alliance when the risk was real and the timeline was short.

In each case, the discomfort in the challenge was precisely what made it worth taking. The question always worth asking yourself is whether the challenge is worth the risk of being wrong.

Leaders who only move when they are confident are protecting something. Leaders who move when they are 50% sure and fully committed are building something.

Let me know if that’s a mindset you resonate with.