Use your limits correctly

Your heart would explode.

That was the common belief for why people couldn’t run a sub 4 minute mile. This was until Roger Bannister broke the 4-minute barrier on May 6, 1954.

So what does a potential heart exploding British medical student tell us about limits and how they are terrible and awesome. As always nuance matters.

Limits are bad

No one had run under a 4-minute mile. There were many theories why a human being couldn’t do it. They all revolved around the limitations of the human body.

The medical people were partly correct, it was a limitation of the human body, but not the heart, the brain.

The 4-minute barrier was a mental barrier more than a physical one.

At the end of the history breaking run, running the mile in 3:59.4, Bannister didn’t stumble over clutching his heart and heading to an early grave. He lived on to 88 years old.

Within a year of Bannister breaking the self-imposed limit, 10 other people had done it. What does this tell us?

Humans didn’t suddenly evolve in a one year period into running machines. It was that we had placed a limit on what could be done. Once someone broke through the 4-minute barrier, others saw that it could be done and went on to do it themselves.

The current record is 3:43.13 by Hicham El Guerrouj.

One question we can ask is what if Bannister had of set his target at 3:55 rather than 4 minutes, did he fail to run as fast as he could because he set his target too high?

Limits are good

With unlimited time and resources, you can achieve anything, and so could anyone else.

The challenge isn’t being effective with resources, the challenge is being effective in the absence of resources.

To demonstrate skill, creativity, curiosity, intelligence, you need to be able to do more with less. Adding constraints to a system means you have to be more efficient to get the same output.

French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal was said to have written – “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.”

It is time consuming and takes skill to write more concisely, to remove all the words that are unnecessary. At film school I got taught that if you can tell a 4 minute story in 3 minutes, tell it in 3 minutes.

Can you do this project with less people? With less money? With less time?

Can the process work with fewer steps?

How do you get very specific on what is the least amount of things that Need to be done.

In software design, they talk about the MVP, or minimal viable product. What is the smallest amount of features that will still solve the problem?

Get rid of all everything you don’t need helps narrow down what is really important.

Limits or Limits?

Putting yourself in a box can limit your potential. We want to achieve x by y. What happens if you could have achieved 2x by y but you set yourself an artificial limit, constricting your own potential success?

Or do you need to add constraints to yourself to help unlock and unleash that creativity that is getting unused by an abundance of resources?

Limits are great, if you use the right one.