I was nervous for the first time in a long time. Last week, I hit the road to kick off the How to Let Go Tour in the Pacific Northwest. On the first night, I called Ryan Nicodemus from the green room in Seattle.

“It feels so weird without you,” I confessed.

“You’re going to do great,” he assured me, followed by a few funny observations about previous events.

This was the start of The Minimalists’ thirteenth tour—but my first solo run. Ryan and I had just finished touring together over the summer for the tenth anniversary of our first Netflix film, and I loved having someone beside me to bounce ideas off in real time.

But a solo show is different.

I had spent nearly a year preparing for this night—ninety minutes of spoken material, more than a hundred slides, dozens of unpublished pages—and yet I still felt anxious without my fleshy safety net standing next to me.

Someone knocked on the green-room door and gave me the five-minute warning. I said goodbye to Ryan, hung up.

My heart raced.
My lungs quickened.
My palms dampened.

And then I realized: I’m not nervous. I’m excited.

I felt alive because I was outside my comfort zone again.

Every human has a baseline need for comfort. But with too much comfort we atrophy. The Discomfort Zone is where we stretch beyond the familiar and discover what we’re actually capable of.

The moment I walked onto the stage, my worries dissolved. I had left my expectations backstage. What followed was two hours of flow.

I don’t remember half of what I said that evening, but I felt all of it. It was a peak experience—not despite the discomfort, but because of it.

The next night in Vancouver was completely different—different material, different audience, different culture, different responses—which brought a whole new kind of discomfort.

How delightful … to be uncomfortable again.

—JFM

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