70. Buy A Bigger Bowl

You can learn a lot about life from a goldfish

I remember running my first 10k and not having any fathom of how I could run one step further.

I did my first half marathon and couldn’t imagine how anybody could complete twice that distance.

I ran my first marathon and knew without a shadow of a doubt that there was no way in hell I could ever race anything longer.

Then I did an Ironman triathlon. And I felt wonderful at the end.

The Limits of Imagination

We are interesting animals, us humans. (Yes, I know we’re mammals, but let’s not split hairs on this one right now.) Most of us can only imagine things that lay within our reach.

Imagination has one foot in reality. In the confines of our human brains, imagination has boundaries.

Look around and you’ll realize that we all live in a box. You can call it “reality” or “the matrix” or whatever the heck else you want. I don’t care if you take the red pill or the blue pill, the fact remains that, in our Reality (capital R), we are trapped on all sides by boundaries and categories. Everything we do and all we see is organized into neat little categorical slots in our brain.

It is this big, that fast or this strong. You are a marketer, a sales person, an engineer. You provide a service, a product, an experience. You are black, latino, caucasian, asian.

There is seemingly a preordained set of categories we use to define ourselves. Everything has its place in the Reality and, for most of us, our imagination is limited to these restrictive categories that define our Reality.

As we scan the limits of our minds for a possible future, we only imagine moving from one category to another. If we feel overweight, we dream of being thin. If we think we are slow, we imagine what it would be like to move faster. If we are a manager we want to be a director.

It is as if our imagination were an elastic band, only stretching the length of our reach. If we aren’t able to maintain the goal, we just thwack back to a steady state of complacency.

But for those who dare, imagination can be extended beyond the limits of our elastic band reach. We can leverage our life experiences to further stretch our imagination and expand our dreams.

Like a scene from the “Truman Show”, day after day we can travel down the same road, until one day we suddenly dare to imagine a different route to a different destination. On that one day, we decide to veer left rather than stay our course to the right. We take the path less traveled, believing and dreaming that it will lead us somewhere new; somewhere better.

The Bannister Effect

When John F Kennedy declared, in 1961, that “this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon,” he had stretched imagination to the extreme, blazing a new path for a new dream.

Kennedy dared to imagine beyond Reality and challenged the nation to accomplish something nobody had dreamed of doing. Something so outlandish that even to this day, 60 years later, many people - those who can’t believe outside their Reality - still claim it never happened and was just a hoax.

As we open up new paths to our dreams, it is not the limitations of our bodies but the limitations of our mind that holds us back.

Nobody ever accomplished a goal without first daring to dream that they could.

Neil Armstrong would never have set foot on the moon in 1969 without the bold belief that it could happen so soon.

Assume you can never be a company leader, and you never will be.

It was Henry Ford who said, “whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.”

As humans, we are given the opportunity to dream on a regular basis. Every day we can imagine a new Reality. We strive to go faster, harder, stronger, longer. We dream of starting our own company or leading a new department. We push ourselves not as much to the limits of our body, but to the limits of our imagination. And when we focus on the dream, when we listen to what Antoine de Saint-Exupery told us one hundred years ago (give or take a decade), that “a goal without a plan is just a wish”, suddenly the dream is in the realm of reality. It is pulled within our enlarged box.

I call this the Bannister Effect.

In a world that believed in the limitations of man, Roger Bannister dared to imagine.

He imagined that he could run a sub-4 minute mile, a feat that was not only far beyond the collective imagination of the time, but believed to be physically impossible.

The overwhelming thought in the early 1950s was that the human body couldn’t move that fast. Bannister didn’t agree.

In 3 minutes and 59.4 seconds on May 6, 1954, Roger Bannister proved the world wrong.

Just as quickly as he broke the 4-minute barrier, he expanded the imaginative limitations of the masses and the floodgates of wide-spread imagination were let loose.

In just 46 days, Bannister’s record was broken. Today, there are hundreds of runners around the world who run sub-4 minute miles on a regular basis.

Expand Your World

All of us have ample opportunity to accomplish new feats every day. It is up to us to challenge ourselves and stretch the limits of our minds. As we do, so our bodies will follow.

Dreaming is the first step down the path of accomplishment, but it is also just the beginning of a long road. We can challenge ourselves every day to continually dream bigger dreams, but without a plan for our body to follow, the dreams will lead to nothing.

The link between body and the mind, between physical and spiritual is at the root of humanity. We set our sites, train our bodies and push our minds to the limit. In the process, we come to realize that our bodies are mere vehicles controlled by the engine of our minds. Once our mind has dared to imagine the unbelievable and we have chartered the course and determination towards accomplishing that dream, ultimately our body follows.

Similarly, once we have set our business goals and chartered a route to get there, the world can conspire to work in our favor. If you plan to double company revenue this year and you’ve laid out a logical plan to achieve that goal, you will discover new doors opening up along your journey.

In a funny way we are like goldfish – we will always expand to the size of our bowl.

No matter how big the challenge set before us, if determined, we will find a way to grow to meet that goal.

Just like Emily Katy, dare to dream. Dare to peek outside the confines of your imagination.

Don’t think you can make a higher salary? Convinced you can’t switch careers? Think you can’t do an Ironman?

I think you are wrong.

Buy a bigger bowl.

Stretch your mind, reach out your arm and put it right through the fire. I promise, you won’t get burned.

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