Tension Creates Enrollment

Tension creates enrollment.

Most people think they have a persuasion problem. They polish their pitches, perfect their proposals, and wonder why no one commits. The truth is simpler and harder: they have a tension problem.

Comfort kills commitment. When you offer clarity, certainty, and comfort—the three C's everyone chases—you create contentment. Contentment never wrote a check, never signed a contract, never changed a life.

Contentment is enrollment's natural enemy.

A person allergic to bananas won't buy your bananas, no matter how passionate your pitch or how perfectly structured your financial model. They're perfectly content not having any bananas. But that's not the real problem. The real problem is trying to sell bananas to people who aren't hungry.

Tension is hunger for change made physical.

Without it, there's no pull, no urgency, no momentum, no buy-in. There's just polite nodding and empty promises that dissolve the moment your audience walks away.

The Science of Desire

I learned this law the hard way during four months that nearly killed my film fund.

Over the summer months, I spread my time between dad mode, church mode (summer camps), family travel, and more. My ability to string together even two consecutive hours of fundraising evaporated. 

For four months, I didn't bring on a single investor. Not one.

The problem wasn't my deal structure, my track record, or my relationships. The problem was that I had stopped creating tension. I had become a comfortable option in comfortable conversations with comfortable people.

Comfort is death to desire. Desire is the only currency that matters.

In September, I found a project that had tension. It was already a fast-moving train, which created the tension of “get on now or miss your chance.” Partnering with that filmmaker and making the film part of Producer Fund I generated momentum and tension for the fund as well. 

Suddenly, conversations changed. The same investors who had been "thinking about it" for months felt the gap between their current position - watching from the sidelines - and their desired position: being part of something moving with or without them.

They enrolled not because I became more persuasive, but because the tension became undeniable.

The mechanism is universal. Every meaningful decision in history was born from tension. Every "yes" that mattered came from someone feeling the cost of "no" in their bones.

All meaningful commitments require tension.

You create tension by making existing gaps impossible to ignore.

The gap already exists. It exists between where they are and where they want to be. Between their current capabilities and their ambitions. Between their present circumstances and their vision for the future.

Your job isn't to manufacture desire. It's to make the existing desire impossible to ignore.

This plays out everywhere:

Investors wire funds because they sense the gap between possible returns and their current position on the sidelines.

Collaborators abandon comfortable gigs because they feel the chasm between their current work and the project they can't stop thinking about.

Audiences buy tickets not for entertainment, but to close the gap between their ordinary Tuesday night and the experience everyone is talking about.

The physics of human behavior is tension. We move to resolve it. Always.

When you're thirsty, you don't need to be convinced to drink. When you're exhausted, you don't need a compelling case for sleep. The tension creates its own momentum toward resolution.

We don't just respond to physical tension. We respond to psychological tension, emotional tension, social tension. The gap between who we are and who we want to become. The space between where we stand and where we want to be seen standing.

Make that gap visible, make it felt, make it urgent. Then enrollment stops being a sales problem. It becomes a relief problem.

People will pay you to help them resolve tension you help them feel.

Our culture avoids tension.

We live in a world of convenience. We avoid hard things and seek shortcuts and solutions. We outsource our entertainment to algorithmic feeds on handheld screens that engage us for hours on end. We’re taught to ignore the tension to protect fragile relationships, avoiding hard, crucial conversations. 

We live in the great flattening. Every rough edge is smoothed, every friction point is eliminated, every uncomfortable moment is medicated away.

But comfort is a drug, and we're overdosing.

Every convenience store, every streaming service, and every app designed to "make your life easier" is making your life flatter. They remove friction, eliminate tension, and smooth out the bumps that make us feel alive.

The result is a generation that mistakes numbness for peace.

But markets, movements, and art are all built on tension. They thrive precisely because they refuse to let us stay comfortable. The Renaissance, the Civil Rights Movement, and even disruptive startups each showed people a gap they could no longer ignore. 

The irony cuts to bone: By avoiding all tension, we've created the most unbearable tension of all. The quiet desperation of a life unlived. The dull ache of potential bleeding out slowly, year after comfortable year.

The growing gap between who we could be and who we're choosing to remain.

Don't you feel it? That restlessness. That sense that you're capable of more, meant for more, built for more. That's not dissatisfaction, that's tension calling you home to yourself.

You have two choices: lean into it or numb it for another decade.

The Cost of Comfort

Here's what happens when you choose comfort over tension:

Your career plateaus because you never create urgency around your offers. Clients take their time deciding because there's no cost to waiting. Opportunities pass you by because you never made anyone feel they might miss out.

Your relationships stagnate because you avoid the hard conversations that create depth. You settle for surface-level connections rather than risk the tension that builds true intimacy.

Your creative work loses its edge because you're more concerned with not offending anyone than with moving anyone. You create content that's pleasant but forgettable, safe but insignificant.

The comfortable life is the forgettable life.

I've watched talented people disappear not because they lacked ability, but because they lacked the courage to create tension. They made it too easy for the market to ignore them, too comfortable for clients to delay, too safe for anyone to feel urgency.

They optimized for comfort but got invisibility instead.

The Tension You're Avoiding

The same law applies to you.

Right now, as you read this, you feel it. The gap between where you are and where you want to be. Between the comfortable conversations you're having and the urgent ones your business needs. Between the polite interest you're generating and the desperate desire you're capable of creating.

You know what you're avoiding. The hard conversation with the investor who's been "thinking about it" for months. The project that could change everything but requires you to risk everything comfortable. The offer that would create real urgency but also real vulnerability.

The market rewards tension because humans are moved by tension.

But most people will read this, nod along, and then return to optimizing for comfort. They'll keep polishing pitches instead of creating pressure. Keep making it easy instead of making it matter.

They'll choose the comfortable path that leads nowhere anyone remembers.

Tension creates enrollment.

The question isn't whether this law is true. The question is whether you're brave enough to live by it.