Pushing Your Limits
The value of scaring yourself can’t be overstated. Sound crazy? Maybe to some, but the idea is to stretch your limits. Find out what is really possible and where your skills and mental capacities lie on the spectrum of living life. Now, there’s a difference between calculated risks, the cerebral approach to extending your skills to their full potential, and just being stupid. Stretching skills is an incremental undertaking; being stupid is, well, doing dumb things without considering the range and likelihood of various outcomes. Is the risk worth the reward?
Certainly, the answer to that question will differ from person to person. What some consider pushing will be routine to others. Mostly, it comes down to the perception of what is truly risky versus skill level and preparation, with a mental capacity and familiarity to handle risk taking. Entrepreneurs by nature are risk takers. It gets easier the more you do it, the more familiar you become with it. They learn to live with a level of uncertainty most of us are not capable of handling. That kind of risk taking is also classical – the more one does it the more one becomes comfortable with stretching the limits of what is possible. The imagination is freed to entertain options that were never previously considered. As a result of this comfort and familiarity resources become more available, further stretching the likelihood of finding that next goal, that next horizon.
Our recent trip to Area 27, a private car race track in Oliver, BC, is a good example of stretching your comfort zone, using your available skills to their limits, and maybe scaring yourself a bit. We had a group of twenty cars and drivers broken into two groups, those with previous track experience and those who had little or none. Two cars spun off the track during our sessions on this 3.1 mile track with 16 turns. One guess as to what group they were in. I bet you said the inexperienced group, but you would be wrong. It was the guys who had the most experience, the most capable cars and who were pushing to find both their own limits and those of their cars. While they knew the risks better than most, they also were the ones truly pushing, and possibly the ones who scared themselves the most. If you are on a racetrack and you don’t have your heart in your throat at least a couple of times, then you’re not doing things right. To know what’s possible, to know where to start, limits need to be found. The only one who can truly challenge you is you.
To scare yourself you need the courage to do, to act, to be responsible and own up to the result whatever the outcome. Failure lies nowhere but on those who endeavor to excel, and blame is a no-win continuation of negativity that always results in failure. We blame others when we are incapable of accepting our own part of failure. There may even be some truth that others failed and were part of our failure, but we share that responsibility, we don’t deflect or deny it. As Yoda famously said, “There is no try. There is do, or do not do.” Nothing else.
After that, there is move on and keep doing until there is success. Failure is only permanent if one ceases to continue. Constructive failure is only another step towards attainment of a goal. Goals are only another step along the journey of self-esteem, personal cleansing and inner satisfaction. Risk taking is always part of meeting goals and setting the next ones. Getting out, doing, testing limits and even, God forbid, having some fun in the process is living. If you’re not doing that, then where are you going?
