207 BCE – there is vicious fighting in China when the Qin dynasty is losing its grip on power. The rebel forces, led by Xiang Yu of the Chu’s is fighting in the Battle of Julu against the much larger Qin. Yu orders his forces to burn their boats. He removed their option to fall back. There is no choice, it is fight or die.
Sometimes comfort is a crutch. You don’t have to work hard, you don’t have to fight. It is easy to be comfortable than to have to struggle for that goal or that dream.
Burning your boats is an extreme example of putting it all on the line. If you fail, you lose it all. But if you succeed, as in Yu’s case, you take your rebel army and defeat the much larger Qin forces and start the end of the dynasty.
Discomfort is not a bad thing. If you only do things that are easy then you never improve. You never push yourself outside your comfort zone and learn new things about yourself.
From a personal point of you, you don’t literally have to burn your boats to use the philosophy of it. You can seek discomfort every day by:
- Taking cold showers
- Working out to exhasution
- Starting that conversation
From a leader/business perspective :
- Does your organisation need to let go of former systems that aren’t working?
- Help some staff move on that are no longer valuable to you but could be valuable elsewhere?
- Change stategies that aren’t working and engage in a different way with the market?
- Aim for a completely new market entirely?
If you spend more time with the discomfort you find that those things that used to be hard become easy.
Burn your boats.
Luke McMeeken-Ruscoe 
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