Why Crushing Our Limits Is Actually Fairly Simple

Limits are shaped by the relativity of time and practice.

When I started high school, I always took the bus to school. My friend told me he preferred to walk for 25 minutes.

“25 minutes?!” I thought to myself. “That sounds so boring. I’d rather read a book on a bus.”

And yet for my friend, walking was one of the most enjoyable parts of his day. He listened to music, looked around, did some light exercise, and had time to think.

At 21, emerging from lockdown with a different place to stay than before, I now have to walk to work for 50 minutes. And 50 minutes back. Not to mention that my part-time job is being a waitress, so I never sit down when I’m there. After 4 months of doing essentially nothing physical, my feet are constantly on fire. I’m exhausted. Yesterday I came home, sprawled on the ground in the hallway, and refused to walk for the rest of the day.

The thing is, I know I’ll be fine. This is just an adjustment period. I know it because after what my high school friend told me, I gave walking a try — and I learned to like it. I walked to school, from school to the city center, to the gym. I slowly gave up on buses.

When I moved to study in the UK, I walked to university for 30 minutes there and 30 minutes back. I walked for 20 minutes carrying heavy grocery bags. I walked to work for 35 minutes.

You can see why 50 minutes isn’t a problem for me now. It won’t be in time, anyway. My feet will get used to it. Over the course of 6 years, I pushed my walking limits higher and higher, and I didn’t even realize that that’s what I was doing. I just walked every day, and through this habit, I learned that I would almost always prefer to walk rather than take the bus.

My 15-year-old-self would probably look at me now and say: “No way! That’s so weird! You’re crazy!”

“I’m not crazy,” I’d respond. “I just walked and walked until my restraining limits on how much I’m willing to walk kind of… disappeared.”

Adjustment is key

I always adjust to new realities quite easily.

I adjusted when I moved 8 times in the last 6 years. I adjusted when I had to somehow cram hundreds of pages of information into my brain for high school final exams.

Two years later, I can’t believe I did this somehow. I adjusted when I had a leading role in a theatre play and it made me shake with anxiety — with every performance, it got easier. I adjusted to leading a single life after being in relationships that defined my happiness for basically 4 years. I was never good at P.E. and when I had to run 1K at school, I thought my lungs were going to die.

At 18, I gave this horrible running business a try. This led me to run 10K at the Great Scottish Run. I adjusted when I decided to write every day after years of struggling, and now 3K words a day doesn’t feel like that much of a stretch. Last September, 3K felt like so much that it gave me an excuse to stop writing for a month.

Adjustment to new realities is the beginning of crushing our limits because once you adjust, you realize that this new reality opens doors to different goals and possibilities to grow as a human being. With new realities come new limits, and they can be higher or lower based on what you adjust to.

Do you adjust to sitting at home not exercising for 4 months? Well, the limits of what your body can physically do are quite low, and possibly much lower than before. Do you decide to workout 5 days a week during quarantine? Your limits are suddenly touching the sky. Your body is stronger, more resistant, more capable, more flexible.

Limits are relative. The only constants that have a role to play in shaping limits are time and practice. That’s all you need.

Time-Practice Relativity

The more you practice, the higher you push your limits, the more you can do.

Achieving our goals and making our dreams come true is actually fairly simple. It doesn’t even have to put a strain on us most of the time.

Daily practice is all you need. You don’t have to write a novel in one day, but you can decide to write at least one sentence every day. This will inevitably lead to writing more, which will lead to coming up with new ideas. And you get the bonus of slowly improving your craft every single day and pushing your limits when it comes to the number of words you think you can write. It’s a win-win situation because you can always find the time to write one sentence.

You can always have time to jog for 10 minutes. To clean one part of your room every day so that it doesn’t get messy. To do a few lessons on Duolingo and practise your German.

Limits bend and change shape slowly. It’s largely dependent on the flow of passing time and on small steps implemented in your daily life. But we can change our limits. We can start by trying to learn about chords and end up being the best guitarists in the city. We can write a novel, win medals, learn to sing, run a marathon, own a business. It all starts small and grows big in time.

This essentially means that we can achieve whatever we set our minds to. All we need to do is to create a habit to keep us going. It’s fairly simple and obvious, but it took me a long time to fully realize the extent of what I can do if I just practice every single day. Even when I’m exhausted, I can still write a sentence, I can still watch a short video in German, I can still wash the dishes.

Even when it’s a small thing that looks like it doesn’t bring you much, it’s important to do it anyway because keeping the momentum of the habit alive is the key to sustaining it. And sustaining your habit inevitably leads to shaping your limits however you wish.

Which leads to achieving anything within your power. And trust me, that power is plentiful.

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