I don't buy in to this "excellence requires discomfort" mythology, at least as used to justify bad work conditions and low compensation in startups. Truly excellent people have intrinsic ambition that wouldn't go away just because they had stable, high salaries. In fact, they're going to have more freedom and do better stuff.
What causes wealth to ruin many people isn't comfort, but the social pressures that are often required if one wants to stay wealthy and in access to high-status people, most of whom turn out to be a defective or, at best, a mediocre crowd. Giving people enough money that they have the autonomy to run their lives and some comfort isn't going to have that effect.
There are real ways in which certain types of discomfort are useful, but many organizations have completely perverted this into "all discomfort builds character."
-To improve rapidly at a skill, you have to practice at the edge of your abilities. If you're a decent writer you're not going to improve by mindlessly writing what you already know for hours on end. Only the time you spend challenging yourself really counts.
-There's a decent amount of evidence that being surrounded by wealth triggers laziness. That is, if your office has opulent wooden desks, high-end art, etc., that sends signals along the lines of "conserve the resources we already have." While if your surroundings are a little messy it triggers an instinct to work hard and gain more resources. The Talent Code goes into detail on this. Note that all that matters here is appearance-this doesn't mean that you'll get more performance by giving your employees crappy computers, it means you'll be better off if your office looks spartan.
As long as a company only promotes "discomfort" in these two elements, that can actually be a good thing. But when you get to the point of physical discomfort, that's almost certainly a negative.
That's really interesting. You're absolutely right on the first point. The issue is more of one where a corporate environment with prevailing discomfort discourages the high-end deliberate practice, because people don't want any more risk or pain. As for the second, this is the first time I've heard about it, but it makes a lot of sense.
What causes wealth to ruin many people isn't comfort, but the social pressures that are often required if one wants to stay wealthy and in access to high-status people, most of whom turn out to be a defective or, at best, a mediocre crowd. Giving people enough money that they have the autonomy to run their lives and some comfort isn't going to have that effect.