3 stories that will let you understand the limits you put in your mindset
The limitless Model
Anyone can learn to be, do, have, and share with no constraints. If there is a gap between your current reality and your desired reality, it means that there is a limit that must be released and replaced in the three areas:
· A limit in your mindset — you entertain a low belief in yourself, your capabilities, what you deserve, or what is possible.
· A limit in your motivation — you lack the drive, purpose, or energy to take action.
· A limit in your methods — you are acting on a process that is not effective to create the result you desire.
We can simplify those limits into three parts:
· The WHAT (Mindset)
· The WHY (Motivation)
· The How (Method)
In this article, I’ll start talking about the limit in your mindset, The WHAT! In the upcoming articles, I’ll talk about the WHY and the HOW.
The limit in your mindset (The WHAT):
I’ll start by telling you three different stories:
1-The story of a young elephant:
Once upon a time, a young elephant was tied to a stake in the ground. When it’s a baby, the elephant isn’t strong enough to pull the stake up, so it eventually stops trying because it learns the effort is futile. As the elephant grows, it gains more than enough power and strength to pull out the stake, but it remains tied up by something as inconsequential as a rope and a flimsy piece of metal because of what it learned as a baby. In psychology, it’s called learned helplessness.
2-The story of Roger Bannister:
In the past doctors and scientists came up with a fact:
“It is impossible to run 1 mile in 4 minutes. It was scientifically proven, and 4 minutes was the limit that our body can support.”
For years no one cross the 4 minutes limits as it was considered impossible and approved by doctors and scientists.
On 6 May 1954, the British athlete and neurologist broke the rule and the record. He ran 1 mile in 3 minutes and 59.4 seconds. What you’ll read next, is a true illustration that the only thing that keeps us from reaching our goals is our mind.
Just 46 days after Bannister’s feat, John Landy, an Australian runner, not only broke the barrier again, but with a time of 3 minutes 58 seconds. Then, just a year later, three runners broke the four-minute barrier in a single race. Over the last half-century, more than a thousand runners have conquered a barrier that had once been considered hopelessly out of reach.
3-The story of a disturbing child:
In 1780, a 10-year-old boy was disturbing his classroom. Asking questions and contradict his teacher. To get rid of the situation, the teacher gave his student an equation to solve and thought that it will keep him busy till the end of the course. The equation was to sum up the series of numbers:
N= 1+2+3+4+…+98+99+100
The child was not a calculating prodigy but upon receiving the task, he saw a different way of summing up the equation:
N=(1+100) + (2+99) + (3+98) + (4+97)+…
All the pairs sum to 101 so the result will be N=50x101= 5,050. After two minutes, he started disturbing the class again.
The child was the German scientist Carl Friedrich Gauss. Nowadays, the formula, for a list of consecutive numbers from 1 through n, is n(n + 1)/2. It’s known as gauss’s formula. Gauss didn’t put a limit on his brain and wasn’t aware that the equation was impossible to solve in two minutes.
I’ll add another story that I discovered myself.
4-The story of a bug:
Back to my early age, I was in a classroom with 40 other students. The classroom contained 20 desks; a desk for two students. They made 4 rows and each row had 5 desks. All this audience (students) had one single board and one teacher standing in front of the board.
Anyway, this is not my point.
I remember I was opening my book and trying to write what is mentioned on the board. Suddenly a small bug come up and started circling around my book. I took a pen and start drawing some lines. The bug started following exactly those lines as it was a path. I was amazed. Then I draw a small circle and the bug didn’t come out of this circle. When reaching the edge, it saw it as a “limit” and turn back. It was then locked inside this “imaginary” small circle.
The morality of those stories:
All those stories have one thing in common: If you believe something is true, so it will be.
1-The young elephant believed that there is nothing he can do to get rid of the stake, even though he grew up and accumulated enough power.
2-Before Roger banister broke the record, everyone believed that it was impossible. They have long waited for this neurologist and athlete to prove them wrong. After this shift in people’s mindsets, breaking this record was way easy and thousands did it.
3-In 1780 everyone believed that this equation: N= 1 + 2 + 3 +…+100, unless you’re a calculator prodigy, will take you a lot of time and effort. At 10 years old, Gauss didn’t have this belief and came up with a simple and fast way to solve it.
4-The bug saw my drawing circle as a real boundary. It’s extremely difficult to accomplish something when you don’t believe it can be done in the first place. The way you perceive something will be your reality.
