How Your Experiences Can Turn Life Into an Uneventful Existence
What are you capable of?
- How Fast can you be?
- How Strong can you get?
- How much Money can you make?
Is there even a way to answer questions like these?
Probably not, because in these questions my brain is looking for an absolute answer.
Something black and white.
Nah, you can’t xx.
Yeah, you can do xx.
Yes, and it’ll take you xx long.
The human mind is drawn to simple, straight forward answers and explanations.
We can find and craft these simple answers to many problems. But, there are many others we can’t.
A question like; “What are you capable of?” can’t be objectively and quantifiably answered.
But, I don’t think that is a good enough reason to close ourselves off to looking for one.
Just because I may never find THE answer, doesn’t mean I won’t come across some answers.
The way I see it, I can approach that question and my life from two different directions:
- I can decide now what is and isn’t possible. Projecting my current abilities forward. With limited insight and ample preconditioned nurturing, I can decide what I am / am not capable of.
And then spend the rest of my life finding evidence to prove myself right.
There’s a lot of certainty and comfort in this approach to life – for what I seek, I am likely to find, even if that is to prove to myself that I am not good enough or could never be good enough.
- Accepting I don’t know the answer and may never know, but spend the rest of my life in the curious pursuit of finding out.
Heading in this direction is far less certain and far more experimental. But I’d argue that the journey and the experiences I’d encounter along the way are likely to be far more memorable too.
My curiosity with this question started back in my early swimming days. I remember sitting in a classroom at a swimming training camp in 2000 or 2001.
We were working with a mindset coach who had given us a performance handbook of sorts to help us with our swimming. Inside the handbook was a poem by Donna Levine.
There is inside you
All of the potential
To be whatever you want to be;
All of the energy
To do whatever you want to do.
Imagine yourself as you would like to be,
Doing what you want to do,
And each day, take one step
Towards your dream.
And though at times it may seem too
difficult to continue,
Hold on to your dream.
One morning you will awake to find
That you are the person you dreamed of,
Doing what you wanted to do,
Simply because you had the courage
To believe in your potential
And to hold on to your dream.
I’ll openly admit that this poem had a major influence on me at the time.
For the next 10 years I had a copy of it printed out and visible, whether it was next to my bed or stuck on the inside of my locker at the pool. There were very few days between the day I first read it and the 200 Breastroke Final at trials in 2012 where I did not see this poem.
There are plenty others like it.
Quotes. Slogans. Poems. Books. Speeches.
- Man in the Arena.
- Anything is possible.
- Impossible is nothing.
- If you can dream it, you can do it.
- Life has no limitations, except the ones you make.
There’s an entire billion dollar industry built around the ideas, phrases and sayings like these.
And between 2001 and 2012 I was all in.
When you are chasing a big dream, you have to.
If you aren’t entirely convinced you can make it happen, your doubt will trip you up at some point in the journey.
Maybe mine did… At the very last hurdle, half way through that Olympic Trials Final in 2012.
But, maybe there are actual limits.
On that night back in April 2012, a mid 20’s Rory discovered that there are actually limits.
Of course there are limits.
There are limits to physics.
There are limits to what your mind can perceive.
There are limits to how your unique genetics can adapt.
There are limits to what your body and biology can tolerate.
On reflection post 2012 Trials I wrote;
“My greatest fear is that as I grow older, I will allow life to get in the way of my dreams. I’ll get caught up in my day to day struggles and forget about what I really want to achieve.
I never want to stop dreaming big, or start thinking “practically”. I don’t want to be the guy that makes excuses for why I can’t do something”
Youthful ignorance?
You could argue that. I have plenty of valid, real life evidence to prove that it is ignorant.
There’s a limit to the maximum number of athletes I can effectively coach at one time, regardless of how good my systems and productivity is. (2017)
No matter how motivated and organized I am, there’s a limit to the number of hours I can effectively train in a week before I cause major health & hormonal issue (2020).
That there are limits to what an athlete I coach can achieve, no matter how well I coach them. (2013-2022).
Understanding the limits comes with experience. There is an upside to gaining experience and finding limits.
Experience is a highly effective teacher.
Much of how we see the world is formed from direct experience.
The brain has evolved to learn lessons by finding patterns in our experiences and use them to predict future outcomes of future experiences.
I act.
Something happens.
I draw a conclusion from the experience.
The conclusion forms the way I perceive and evaluate future opportunities.
- I touched a hot stove.
- It hurt! I burned my fingers.
- Hot stoves aren’t for touching.
- Next time I see a hot stove. I won’t touch it.
Often deciding what to do based on prior experience is helpful because you’ve learned a lesson that will keep you alive and healthy.
But what about the downside of experience?
- I tried to make an Olympic team
- I didn’t succeed, even after 10 years of trying
- It hurt to fail. I didn’t have the emotional maturity to navigate the failure
- I’m not good enough to be an elite performer. I’m not going to set audacious goals in future
What opportunities and possibilities have I closed myself off to because a prior experience gave me a list of reasons why it won’t work?
The 2012 Rory somehow had the insight to predict the future.
As I’ve grown older I am having to fight the reality of thinking practically and having “life” get in the way of my most audacious goals.
In the last 3 years, I think I’ve failed here more often than I have won. It’s been a slippery slope.
The optimistic, limitless, outlook that made me an elite swimmer got ousted on the back of a sequence of “failures” and negative experiences.
A more balanced, realistic approach ensued. I began to approach everything with a realistic lens. There are limits, after all, and I could see them everywhere.
The more I focused on the limits, the more I argued for my (or human) limitation. The more I argued for the limitations, the more they became mine.
The bigger I made them, the more they influenced my perception of what is possible.
At times the evidence and experiences stacked up so high I spiraled into a cynical and pessimistic view of myself and the people and opportunities around me.
The arguments and evidence for a limited existence are justified, there’s plenty of valid, real life evidence to prove all of the ways I, we, all of us are inadequate and limited.
But that’s a toxic and dangerous position to hold in life.
I can tell you with conviction that the cynical, pessimistic outlook is no way to pursue a life worth living.
And so, while I have no idea of what you or I may be capable of, or where the limits lie,
I’d rather spend the rest of my life in the curious pursuit of finding out.
Because even if I fail 1000 times in the pursuit of something I think is audacious, it beats the hell out of doing the mundane and spending the rest of my life justifying it.
Be brave, my friends.
