Argue for your limitations and you get to keep them.
American industrialist and business magnate Henry Ford once said “Whether you think you can, or you think you can‘t–you’re right.” We set limits on our abilities both imaginary and psychological but the reality is that we can all surprise ourselves by what we can accomplish if we set our mind to it. As Napoleon Hill noted in his classic book, “Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve.”
“The tragedy of life is often not in our failure, but rather in our complacency; not in our doing too much, but rather in our doing too little; not in our living above our ability, but rather in our living below our capacities.” – Benjamin E. Mays
When an elephant was very young and weighed only several hundred pounds, it was restricted by having a chain clasped to its leg and connected to a tree or deep stake. When the animal tried to move away and learned that it could not break the chain, it limited itself. It believed that whatever restriction was put on it—even a rope it could have easily broken—was more powerful than it was.
People are like those elephants. We often believe that some of the restrictions we may have experienced earlier in life are permanent. Or we’ve been told we have limitations that we actually don’t possess, and these things are keeping us from taking the journey in life that we long for. These are the chains we need to break. 1
“We spend most of our twenties discovering all of the hundreds of things we can be. But as we mature into our thirties, we begin to discover all of the things we will never be. The challenge for us as we reach our forties and beyond is to put it all together—to know our capabilities and recognize our limitations—and become the best we can be.” – Catherine B. Ahles, public relations professor and vice president for college relations at Macomb Community College
Because nothing is impossible, you have to dream big dreams; the bigger, the better. So many people along the way, whatever it is you aspire to do, will tell you it can’t be done. But all it takes is imagination. You dream. You plan. You reach. There will be obstacles. There will be doubters. There will be mistakes. But with hard work, with belief, with confidence and trust in yourself and those around you, there are no limits. Perseverance, determination, commitment, and courage—those things are real. The desire for redemption drives you. And the will to succeed—it’s everything. 1
If you put a limit on anything, you put a limit on how far you can go. I don’t think anything is too high. The more you use your imagination, the faster you go. If you think about doing the unthinkable, you can. The sky is the limit.
In Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story, Former Bodybuilding Champion, and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger writes about the Psychological limit we set for ourselves:
Reg Park also taught me a key lesson about psychological limits. I’d worked my way up to three hundred pounds of weight in calf raises, beyond any other bodybuilder I knew. I thought I must be near the limit of human achievement. “So I was amazed to see Reg doing calf raises with one thousand pounds.”
“The limit is in your mind,” he said. “Think about it: three hundred pounds is less than walking. You weigh two hundred fifty, so you are lifting two hundred fifty pounds with each calf every time you take a step. To really train, you have to go beyond that.” And he was right. The limit I thought existed was purely psychological. Now that I’d seen someone doing a thousand pounds, I started making leaps in my training.”
It showed the power of mind over body. In weight lifting, for many years there was a 500-pound barrier in the clean and jerk—kind of like the four-minute barrier in the mile, which wasn’t broken until Roger Bannister did it in 1954. But as soon as the great Russian weight lifter Vasily Alekseyev set a new world record of 501 in 1970, three other guys lifted more than 500 pounds within a year.
I saw the same thing with my training partner Franco Columbu. One afternoon years later we were taking turns doing squats at Gold’s Gym in California. I did six reps with 500 pounds. Even though Franco was stronger than me in the squat, he did only four reps and put the bar back. “I’m so tired,” he said. Just then I saw a couple of girls from the beach come into the gym and went over to say hello. Then I came back and told Franco, “They don’t believe you can squat five hundred pounds.” I knew how much he loved showing off, especially when there were girls around. Sure enough, he said, “I’m gonna show them. Watch this.”
He picked up the 500 pounds and did ten reps. He made it look easy. This was the same body that had been too tired ten minutes before. His thighs were probably screaming “What the fuck?” So what had changed?
The mind. Sports are so physical that it’s easy to overlook the mind’s power, but I’ve seen it demonstrated again and again.
Meditations
- Daily Jay with Jay Shetty – Stretch Yourself
- Self-Expansion is the theory that humans have the innate drive to grow their capabilities. We thrive when we expand what we can do and who we are but inevitably throughout our lives, we reach plateaus.
- The Eighty Five Percent Rule for optimal learning 4 – The researchers found that the optimal error rate for training is around 15.87% or, conversely, that the optimal training accuracy is about 85%.
- Life is not about relentless striving, it is about fostering engagement and expansion so that you can experience better meaning and growth.
Daily Calm with Tamara Levitt – Karuna
- Karuna is a Sanskrit word that translates as compassion. The practice begins by offering ourselves compassion and it then organically spreads to the people around us and then to the whole world.
Many of us think that compassion drains us, but I promise you it is something that truly enlivens us. – Joan Halifax
All the Best in your quest to get better. Don’t Settle: Live with Passion
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