Comfort Is a Skill Thief

I did not expect a car feature to teach me anything about leadership.

When I first got my car, it came with a self-driving function. I was skeptical. I did not like it at first. It felt unnecessary and slightly uncomfortable, like giving up control for the sake of convenience. At times, I was quite literally fighting the wheel for control.

Then I got used to it. Over time, I began to enjoy it. It reduced cognitive load. Driving felt lighter. I could hold thoughts longer and stay oriented to bigger-picture problems, rather than the mechanics of driving.

I used it regularly for about two months. This week, I no longer had access to that feature. And almost immediately, I noticed something subtle but unsettling. My driving felt a little rusty. I was more tentative in situations that used to feel automatic.

Nothing dramatic. Nothing unsafe. Just enough to notice. The convenience had helped. But it had also quietly taken something with it.

What struck me was not that the technology worked. It did. What struck me was that cognitive load reduction is not neutral. When we offload effort, we also offload practice. Skills do not disappear when they are not used. They decay.

That realization extends far beyond driving. In leadership, we are surrounded by tools designed to make things easier. Dashboards summarize complexity. Automation handles decisions at scale. AI drafts, analyzes, recommends. Teams absorb execution. Layers of process create distance from the work itself. All of this is useful. Necessary, even. But there is a quiet risk if we are not paying attention.

When leaders stop practicing certain forms of thinking, they lose fluency in those skills. When judgment is repeatedly outsourced, it becomes harder to step back in when conditions change. When comfort becomes the default, capability erodes without announcing its departure.

This is not an argument against automation or delegation. It is an argument for intentional use. Strong leaders know which skills they can safely offload and which ones they must actively retain. They know when to let systems run and when to drive manually. They remain close enough to the work to sense when something feels off, even if the metrics look fine.

The most effective leaders I have worked with share a common trait. They use tools to reduce noise, not to abdicate responsibility. They preserve their ability to reason, diagnose, and decide under uncertainty. They stay sharp where it matters most.

Comfort is seductive because it feels like progress. And often it is. But unexamined comfort has a cost. The lesson my car taught me was simple. Relief without awareness can leave you less ready than you realize.

In leadership, readiness is the job. The goal is not to reject ease. It is to remain capable when ease is no longer available. That takes intention. And practice.