The only realms that I can think of in which the notion of the voluntary adoption of and adaptation to discomfort has been successfully introduced is
Religion Athletic training
I have decided to (at this time) forego the incorporation of the Church of the Awkward Interface (hmmmm... foregoing some nice tax benefits), and concentrate for the time being on the athletic training meme.
See how far I get.
Art
I think the athletic training metaphor is a fine one to milk. I'm drawn to the bicycle world in particular, where there's the actual activity of riding, which may be very strenuous (distance racing is one of the most punishing of all competitive sports), but also the job of maintaining the bike. Race car people do the maintenance too, including deep rebuilding of engine components, but the bicycle is more transparent, lighter weight, so I'll stick with them. Horses would have been another option, but our urban kids wouldn't get it. To me, the *nix OS as approached through the command line feels like a bicycle repair shop. Lots of little tools, all of which do something useful and specialized. Used in concert, you can do wonders with your bicycle, which on this analogy might be some project or application you're developing (maybe for someone else -- bicycle shops aren't confined to working on the owner's bike, especially given ssh). The *nix OS, unlike Windows, is all about giving the developer a lot of developer tools. Microsoft sees those as extra (e.g. Visual Studio), and as intensively GUI-based. That's because DOS was written for the end user, the stereotypical consumer of apps. Early Windows was merely a GUI-based wrapper for DOS (at least at first) and preserved the "developers do it elsewhere (i.e. on our more expensive platforms)" aesthetic. Also, although bicycle technology has changed over the years, it's still very inter-generational. Likewise the command line. Some may consider it antiquated, superseded by the GUI, the desktop. That's not really a correct assumption. People still need to build and fix bicycles, and the command line tools still make sense. Some are more obscure than others, but it's not a waste of time to get fluent with at least a subset of them. The link to math and Python is that math notations aim to be self-contained i.e. to take my course, you don't need to take any other mathematician's course, because like she or he, I'm trained to build everything from axioms right in front of you, such that my towering theorems are seen to rest on my secure foundations, and you're suitably impressed -- like, math is impressive. So if we're playing around with shells, doing math, we'll at least need to at least be able to ssh, ls, cd and such. We don't tell you to go down the hall for that; just stay in your seat and all will become clear, and if you've heard it before, listen again, because this is the math department now, and math is different. Kirby