If you’ve read our blog for any amount of time, you know that there are quite a few posts on here about dealing with adversity.  This mostly has to do with the fact that business is hard stuff and we like to share things to keep you motivated along your journey.  To that end, I wanted to share a few experiences with you.

A few summers back I got this crazy idea to ride my bike to four states in the same day.  While it was a challenge (hey, we’re talking about 200+ miles in a single shot) I managed to pull it off.  The funny thing is that when I relay that story to my non-cyclist friends, they often respond with something like “man, I could never do that.”

Recently I was watching some extreme sports type show with some friends and they ended up playing this Jeb Corliss clip of him “Grinding The Crack.”  In case you don’t know who Jeb is, he’s one of those wing suit pilots who jumps off cliffs and then “flies” back to earth.  Needless to say, after watching this clip, many of my friends were like “there is no way I could do that.”

Based on the comments to the two situations listed above, can you guess the four words you should never say?  Yup – I couldn’t do that.  Technically it’s five words because of the contraction, but you get the jest of it!

The reason one should never say those words, is because they are self limiting.  While it’s possible to assume what one could not do, you’ll never know until you at least try.  Here’s a prime example.  When I was in college I wanted to join a fraternity.  However, as with all “secret” organizations, I was a little hesitant because I just knew that they were going to make me do “something” in order to join.  What that something was, I had no idea, but all I knew was that I was apprehensive about it.

Without going into any real detail, yes, there were some things that had to be done.  Furthermore, some of those things one might think were impossible for one to do when initially presented.  However, I will say that despite what I perceived to be my own boundaries, those boundaries were in fact a lot further away than what I initially thought.  Or said another way, my limits were actually a lot higher than what I believed.  This led me to adopt the philosophy that you can do a lot more in life than you think you can.  Even if you are going through a really tough stretch in life, you can probably handle a lot more before you hit your breaking point.

Thus, the moment that you say that you can’t do something, you are limiting yourself.  If you say that you can’t learn to swim, you won’t.  If you say that you’ll never be able to climb Mt. Everest, then you never will.  If you say that you’ll never get your hobby up and running into the next big thing that society craves, then it just won’t happen.  But if you start out with a little hope and instead say “I think I can,” you might just be surprise at how far you can go.

Until next time…