We often hear around us to push our limits, to go beyond them, only doing that we will succeed. I can agree with that statement, but I believe most of the people that are preaching this “push your limits as long as possible” don’t mention a little, tiny important thing. And that is knowing your limits first.
How can you expect someone to push beyond their limits if they don’t know what their limits are? Would you buy a car if you din’t know the max km/hour that car can push? Would you buy a PC without knowing his specs?
This is the same with the humans. The first you should do when you try to push beyond your limits should be to know your limits first. Know thy self and you will conquer the world, or so the sages say.
Knowing your limits it’s the first thing do to in conquering them. Let me take a proper example to theorize better.
Let’s say you want to do push-ups. You even set yourself a goal of 100 push-ups/day. The reasons why you want to do it doesn’t matter, that is your own motivation. The important thing is that you want it. You look after a program on-line, you find it and start working the first day and you see that after 10 push-ups, your engine is starting to slow down, you manage to do one or two more and you fall on the floor, gasping for air.
I don’t know what you were expecting, when the last push-up you did before this was 3 years ago. Your limit right now is 10 push-ups, because the last two that you did weren’t push-ups, but a fool struggle.
What do to now, you ask yourself? The program it’s for 15 days and in the first day I should do 30 push-ups.
Well my dear friend. You will do only 10 for now. And you will do those 10 push-ups each day until you can do them without breaking a sweat. After that you will start doing 20, 30 and so on until you have reached your goals.
Maybe my story is not the best example, or maybe it is. I don’t know. If you are reading this article, you will draw your own conclusions. The bottom line is that you don’t have to push beyond your limits in one go, and force yourself to do things that you can’t do. Everything must be done with baby steps. This way the needed confidence will be gained step by step and before you know it you will conquer your limits without any issues.