How to Achieve Almost Anything: A Lesson from an 80LB Dumbbell

When I was doing heavy weights at the gym I knew my limit. I thought I was smart for it. I knew that doing a dumbbell press with 65 lb is my maximum. Going to 70 lb, let alone 75 lb or 80 was beyond me.

I never had a solid reason why 70 lb was the cut-off point. It’s just that 65 lb seemed pretty heavy and I couldn’t imagine going heavier. And yet, I felt that in order to progress and get results, I needed to lift heavier. I was just too scared to do it.

I spoke to a friend of mine who was a personal trainer. He told me that 70 lb is a heavy weight but that in the least I owed it to myself to try. I told him that, no, 70 lb was just beyond my abilities, so no point in trying.

He looked at me and asked me one question:

“How did you get to do 65 lb?”

I stared back and said:

“What do you mean? I started with 50 lb, then I tried 60 lb and eventually I graduated to 65 lb.”

“Yes, but my point is before you did 65 lb, did you know you can do that many?” he persisted.

I thought about it. I didn’t know. It wasn’t until I tried doing a dumbbell press with 65 lb that I knew I can do that much. My friend also explained that 70 lb is not much heavier than 65 lb. It’s less than 8% increase in weight. It didn’t seem like a lot.

Now, I could see myself doing 70 lb. It was physically possible but I still didn’t think I should try it. What if I injured myself? What if I dropped the weight or lost balance and hurt myself? I didn’t want to be one of those guys who think they are so big and strong just to hurt themselves and look silly. How embarrassing. I had conquered the first obstacle of imagining myself going beyond my limit. Now, I had to conquer my fear of doing it.

How you go about conquering your fear may differ from person to person. For me, logic and probability usually works. I led myself through the following internal dialogue:

“Let’s be honest: what’s the worst that can happen by trying to do a dumbbell press with 70 lb?”

“Well, if I warm up properly and am focused, the worst that can happen is dropping the weight from a finish position down on the floor.”

“Would I injure myself?”

“Not really. If I follow the right form, even if I lose control of the weight, it will fall on the floor beside me.”

“Is there any other precaution I can take?”

“I could ask someone to spot me the first time I do it. The guys are the gym do it all the time and they seem pretty friendly.”

Going through this mental process I realized that my fear had no basis for existence. I had to take the exercise seriously and I had to be cautious but other than that, I didn’t see any other risk or danger upgrading my dumbbell press.

“The meaty guy over me shouted “Two”.”

So I did it. I lugged the 70 lb dumbbells to my bench, asked one of the guys next to me to spot me and loaded up the dumbbells onto my chest in a starting position. I focused, breathed in and forcefully exhaled pushing 140 lb above my chest. My spotter’s hand hovered below my elbows.

I brought the weight down again, inhaling deeply. Breathing out, I pushed the weight up. I brought it down again. The meaty guy over me shouted “Two”. We kept going this way until my arms started trembling. At that point I had done six reps.

I had done it. At this point I didn’t know that in two weeks I will do the same exercise with 75 lb and in another three weeks I was going to upgrade to 80 lb. Every time I increased my weight I went through the same thought process: I imagined I can do it and I conquered my fear with logic.

The Domino Effect

My approach to increasing my bench press weight was the domino effect. We all know what the domino chain reaction is: if you line up dominoes and you knock one down, all dominoes will get knocked down in a chain reaction. This is fun but it gets better.

In 1983 University of British Columbia physicist Lorne Whitehead demonstrated that if you line up dominoes, which grow in size by 1.5 times, you will need only 29 pieces to knock down the Empire State Building. Professor Stephen Morris (University of Toronto) demonstrates this chain reaction.

In The One Thing (Amazon) Gary Keller and Jay Papasan apply the same approach to goals. By making small gradual progress in one direction, eventually you will accomplish something, which may have seemed impossible.

My weightlifting experience demonstrates this theory. If from day one I had tried to bench press 80lb, that would have been impossible and I probably would have injured myself. However, by gradually building up to my target weight, I could eventually accomplish my goal.

The same process applies to other areas. Let’s pick something fun: your boss assigns you a big project to update all the processes in your department. Knowing that you work at a big bank that lives and breathes processes and procedures you know you can spend your life trying to document everything.

There are two ways to go about this projects:

1. Panic Mode: you freak out, throw your hands up in the air and frantically start pulling binders with old processes and procedures. This approach is great if you want to look very busy. It doesn’t work so well if you want to accomplish results.

2. Domino Effect Mode: you step back, take a breath and try to see the big picture. If you don’t know what that looks like, then you ask other people. You start looking for patterns and repeating blocks. Each process is unique in its own way but often it has something in common that it shares with all other processes. If you can find and update this common piece, you will have 80% of your work done.

The domino effect can be applied in software development too. I’m no expert at it but from talking to developer friends I know that each piece of software has a core function — it is the main thing that the software does. This core functions can also be built of different blocks itself. If you clearly define the core of the core function and start with that piece, then the rest is just building up. Once you have the core built, then you can add the bells and whistles.

Let’s take Facebook as an example of how to build a product starting from the core. If you remember the early days, you will recall that Facebook was really a message board for your college friends. Even today, this is Facebook’s core function — a place to share information with your friends. The difference between Facebook now vs. the early days is that now it has more bells and whistles — Facebook Messenger, Pages, Groups, advertising services, etc. All of these functions, however, are simply add-ons to the core piece of Facebook. From a user’s perspective, Facebook’s main purpose remains the same — a place to share information with your friends. All other functions the platform has are great but no one joins Facebook because of its awesome note-taking features.

To sum up, by applying the domino effect approach, we can really achieve almost anything. It has helped me not only lift 80 lb dumbbells but also improved the way I approach work and life in general. What is your experience with achieving small results on which you build on? I’d love to hear your experience, so share in the comments below.

Originally published at vicslist.org.