Why Your Ideas Are Holding You Back
You are a flea in a jar
Who are you?
You’d probably reply with your name.
But what happens if you change your name?
Would that change what it means to be you?
In the end, a name is just a label. If not your name, you might go on to tell me your professions — businessman, banker etc. , but those are labels too aren’t they?
Your sense of self, and everyones sense of you, is all but an idea. That idea is reinforced by what you do and your constant associations of those actions to what you consider yourself.
An idea only stands if people believe in it. The more who do, the stronger the idea stands.
If you believed yourself to be an actor when nobody else did, are you truly an actor?
The real answer to the question, “Who you are”, is, of course, that you are an idea, and any other attempt to describe yourself is just a label that reveals part of that idea.
So many things in human culture rely on people believing in ideas. What separates a country from another? Boundaries are virtual and borders negligible. There are many countries that do not accept the borders given to them, constantly crossing them and causing much chaos.
It is the belief in the idea that a piece of land is separated, held by millions of people that makes it so.
This reminds me of an anecdote I heard about fleas. Put fleas in a jar and they will jump out. Put a lid on it and they will still try, but slowly become accustomed to their new existence and stop trying.
The lid is then taken off, and, surprisingly, the fleas don’t make any attempt to jump out. They remain, accustomed to their new existence, held inside by the mere idea that they cannot get out.
We are those fleas.
We are bound by ideas of things, without realising that these ideas reside only in our heads.
What separates a white human from a black human, or a female one from a male one but the mere idea that they are ‘different’?
Similarly, you are probably held back in various areas of your life because you have assumed that there is a lid to your jar. You think that what you want to do is impossible, just like a flea would think breaking through the lid of a jar is impossible.
What you must realise, is that there is no lid. There is nothing holding you back other than that idea in your head.
Every great person in history has fundamentally understood this concept, which is what allowed them such greatness.
Einstein broke the assumption that to be a physicist, you needed to be working as a professor — he was a clerk when he wrote the theory of relativity. (He also fundamentally changed the way we look at the universe)
Jobs and Wozniak broke the assumption that computers were only used by large corporations, and made the first computer for home use, and revolutionised the way we interact with computers by making the GUI mainstream.
All boundaries are conventions, waiting to be transcended
There must be ideas in your life that are holding you back, but once you realise something simple, it won’t anymore.
There is no lid to your jar.
Thanks for reading,
Sarvasv
