I bet you think I’m going to say you should do athletics because it’ll keep you healthy and generally make your life better. Well, it will absolutely do that, but today, I’ll be talking about something else.
To start with, let me ask you a question. Do you know where your limits are?
Can you tell me what your physical limits are? How long can you hold your arms out to the sides? I’m not asking how long you can do it before it hurts. I’m not even asking how long you can do it before it hurts seemingly too much to bear. I’m asking how long you can hold them before your muscles physically give out and your arms drop limply to your sides.
How about your mental limits? What’s the most difficult problem you can solve? How long can you focus on a boring task? What about working in a team; what’s the most difficult project you’ve helped to complete?
These seem like personal questions, and they are. Fortunately for you, I’m not asking you to scream your answers from the rooftops, to tell them to me, or even to say them aloud to an empty room. I’m only asking you to consider whether or not you have answers, within the comfort and privacy of your own mind. The answer will tell you something important.
I recall a conversation I had with my fiancé. I was trying to explain how difficult a project I was working on was, and by way of trying to explain my level of mental exhaustion, I asked, “have you ever worked a muscle to failure?” It turned out that the answer was actually “no”, and I honestly didn’t know how to work with that.
It occurred to me then that an awful lot of people actually don’t know where their limits are, mentally or physically. They’ve never pushed themselves as hard as they possibly can. And because of this, people almost chronically underestimate themselves. If you don’t know the upper limit of what you’re capable of, you assume de facto that the best you have done is the best you can do.
But let me tell you something. The best you have done is not the best you can do. The best you have done is, at most, the best you think you can do. Your actual uppermost limit is probably much higher than anything you’ve done before.
If you get into a squat and hold it, you won’t feel anything at first. After that, you’ll start to feel a bit of a burn in your legs and core. If you hold it longer, the burning feeling will get progressively worse. Your legs might start to shake. If you keep it up long enough, you won’t be able to focus on anything other than the pain. Now, you might think this is your natural limit, but actually, it isn’t. Your mind might not be able to keep going, but your body certainly can. Your body doesn’t give up until your muscles literally do not have enough energy to keep holding the position, and if you can get all the way there, you’ll somewhat anticlimactically fall on your ass. That is your natural limit.
There’s a pretty big delta between the point at which you think you’ve hit your limit and the point at which you’ve actually done it. That delta is your untapped potential. It takes a lot of focus and raw chutzpah to access, and it requires pushing through a lot of pain, but you’ll realize that you can actually do a lot more than you thought. And in the process of working to failure, you’ll improve so much faster than someone who just gives up when it gets painful. The human body is not static; it improves based on what you throw at it. If more shit hits the fan, the fan gets stronger.
This isn’t just about sports and working out. People are pretty bad at finding their mental limits too, for the exact same reason: it becomes painful a long time before it becomes impossible, and a lot of people think massive pain and difficulty is their upper limit. But if you can focus and muster the chutzpah, the immensely difficult can become routine, because you can adapt and improve. Because the human mind is not static, either.