A good friend - a no-nonsense university scientist who's convinced that every book, workshop or website I've mentioned in this column is weak-minded poppycock - recently took up skydiving. But perhaps we don't know each other as well as I thought, because he apparently believed I might say yes when he invited me to join him in jumping out of planes for no reason. It would be scary, he acknowledged, but anything really worth doing is scary. Quite so. It doesn't follow, however, that everything scary is worth doing; running blindfold across a busy stretch of the M1 would be terrifying, but personal growth would be unlikely. "Do one thing every day that scares you," Eleanor Roosevelt said: I've quoted her admiringly here before, but she surely wasn't advocating a life spent sticking your fingers in electrical sockets.

This is also my problem with the idea of the "comfort zone", a concept bandied about by self-help authors perhaps more freely than any other. If you want to succeed at anything, they explain, you try stepping outside your comfort zone, or preferably do something rather more muscular, such as (to quote one book title) Smashing Out Of The Comfort Zone or even (to quote one blogger) Destroy[ing] That Comfort Zone To Bits. The theory goes as follows: things that we owe it to ourselves to do - quit a job, demand a raise, ask someone out, end a relationship - will always seem horribly unpalatable, because they induce so much anxiety. What's rarely mentioned, however, is the obvious point that really stupid ideas are likely to seem unpalatable, too. If the idea of leaving your job fills you with resistance, is that because it's a great idea, or a terrible one?

Which isn't to say that the comfort-zone concept isn't useful, so far as it goes. Figuring out how to "feel the fear and do it anyway", in the words of Susan Jeffers's classic and actually very level-headed mega-bestseller, is a surely desirable skill. But the point isn't to force yourself to make frightening choices, or to "seek the discomfort zone", as the exhaustingly frenetic management guru Tom Peters (or tompeters!, as he styles himself on his website) recommends. Rather, it's a matter of ceasing to make the internal demand that you have to feel a certain way before you can take a particular action. The bookshelves heave with advice on how to feel confident in social settings, or motivated to take exercise, how to get inspired for creative projects, etc. But what if you just accepted that you felt afraid, or unmotivated, or uninspired, and went fearfully, unmotivatedly, uninspiredly onward?

"Give up on yourself," wrote the late Japanese psychologist Shoma Morita, whose deadpan approach provides a refreshing respite from the legions of grinning positive thinkers. "Begin taking action now, while being neurotic or imperfect or a procrastinator or unhealthy or lazy or any other label by which you inaccurately describe yourself. Go ahead and be the best imperfect person you can be, and get started on those things you want to accomplish before you die."

oliver.burkeman@]theguardian.com