Go hunting for false limits

In 2 easy steps!

In defending the development of a time warping machine at the D11 Conference, Elon Musk politely reminded us that unless something breaks a law of physics, it’s possible. Most people tend to define “possible” a bit more narrowly — for instance: “It’s not possible for me to get there by 9am.”

It’s hard to put it better than Steve Jobs did:

When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world — try not to bash into the walls too much; try to have a nice family life; have fun; save a little money… that’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader. Once you discover one simple fact, and that is: everything around you that you call ‘life’ was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.(video)

Those walls that we operate inside of every day — those limits — we don’t notice them most of the time. After a lifetime of operating within them, one need not consciously consider limits in order to slavishly obey them. When we see a sidewalk, our body runs the “sidewalk” program and we don’t have to think in order to prevent ourselves from wandering into the street.

As kids and later as adults, we write countless internal programs. Those that prevent us from being hit by cars are desirable; those that prevent us from creating something new — that prevent us from greatness — are not.

Ideally, we’d all grow up in environments that discourage slavish obedience to unnecessarily limiting programs. (I consider myself genuinely lucky because I went to an elementary school that embraced this). But great schools, great homes provide a leg up, not an antidote. Unless you completely hermitize yourself — lock yourself away so you can’t see all of this stuff called ‘life’ around you — you’re going to write limiting programs. And that’s a good thing. Without these programs, every day would be an exhausting parade of problems. Everything would require full blown consideration — no short cuts, no best practices. Uh oh: shoe came untied. How should you approach re-tying it? What knot holds best? Are laces even the optimal material for fastening shoes? Should you be wearing shoes at all? You’d be basically useless because you’d spend your full daily allotment of creative energy by the time you finished breakfast.

But if you never break these programs — if you never empower yourself to overcome a limitation that nobody else has overcome — then you’re not going to produce anything truly new, anything great.

And if reading the previous statement has you thinking, “that’s a bit dramatic for my life — I’m not one to aim for greatness,” then, good news! You’ve already completed step 1 of the following 2 step program:

1. find a limit
2. kill it by forcing a behavior that disobeys that limit

Step 1 is pretty obvious; it’s best to know what you’re trying to shoot before you pull the trigger. So identify that assumption or limitation that’s holding you back. Something like: “I’m not one to aim for greatness,” or “I’ll leave health to the athletes,” or “cars require human drivers and there’s nothing I can do about that”…

Step 2 probably warrants more explanation. I’m going to steal here from AJ Jacobs’ excellent talk on the value of “Self Delusion,” or of faking it until you make it. He argues that it’s easier to change your mindset by changing your behavior than it is to change your behavior by changing your mindset. There’s biological basis for this concept in studies around posture: strike a confident, space-consuming pose to actually create a biochemical reaction that results in increased confidence. Force yourself to smile and you’ll actually BE happier (that’s right, as measured in your brain chemistry).

So if you think your life might benefit from aiming for greatness (and of course it would), go ahead and fake that shit. Say something great and high-aiming. Hatch an audacious plan just because you can. Read about a hero and discover his incredible resemblance to yourself. Or just put on his/her suit. Or maaaybe just write an overly ambitious post on Medium. Don’t wait for anyone; jump in — all the way in — confident with the knowledge that all of this stuff and all of these rules were made up by humans like you, organisms nearly genetically indistinguishable from that supermodel in the mirror.