want to know your limits?? Compete against yourself not with others…

A very prominent set of questions that I am asking myself these days: “what is my limit? How far can I stretch myself? How much can I take before I break?

I think it’s a very important question to ask yourself. And what is more important is to find the answer to it. Find the answer not verbally, but practically, physically and emotionally.

Very often I feel I live in my comfort zone and have established a very comfortable extreme limit for me which only allows my mind and body to tax itself upto the level where its easy to give up. I know this to be true of many others as well, and that’s why we all are called under-achievers. I would think there are only 2-3% people in the world who really test the limits of their mind and body. Infact, they believe there are no boundaries to strengths and capabilities of their mind and/or body. And those truly are the people who stand out in life. They might not all be successful well known people, but they are the people who have dared to test their mind and body to the extreme limits, and known what the human mind/body is actually capable of achieving.

The difference between us and them is only the fact that we have never tried to check our limits. I think we are afraid of finding out what we are capable of because then it would raise the benchmark that much higher for the rest of your life.

And secondly, most of us set our limits to only a little higher than the highest limit set by the people around us. We benchmark our limits against others, instead of challenging them against our own limits.

Think about it: if you are into jogging/running on a track or treadmill, when you started, you could barely manage 1 full mile of running. But as a month goes by, you tend to build up some good stamina and have started testing 1.5 miles, so now the new benchmark every time u go to the gym or club is 1.5 miles. Within 8 months you are running a good 5 miles everyday, which sets your new limit at that? But is that actually the true and final limit that your body can take?? You would like to make yourself believe that because beyond that you seem to lose the sense of achievement or have already surpassed the limits of all those around you. So there is nothing more to brag about in front of friends and gfs/bfs, and you let your limit float around. If infact you were competing against yourself, at 5 miles, you are then trying to compete and better those 5 miles/day record. This will only push u further to get to 6 miles because u want to beat those 5 miles.

There is a fantastic by-product of competing against yourself which in turns makes you a much better person.

When you are competing against others, and you win, there is a sense of achievement and ARROGANCE that starts setting in when you realize you are much better than your peers. However, when you are constantly competing against yourself, and you keep winning, you are not doing that to show your superiority over the others, you are doing it for yourself, and so you don’t realize when you have started over-performing. You don’t tend to show-off, or show the other guys down. Your natural instinct is not to compare with others, and so you are never arrogant in your approach with others.

The best sportsmen in the world, Michael Phelps, Roger Federer, Tiger Woods (his sporting credentials are absolutely unparalleled and cannot be taken away because of his scandalous character) and many more have been what they have been because they always tried to compete with themselves and improve themselves. If Tiger Woods would have been happy being better than the best of the others, he would have been just another golfer who more often than the rest. But Tiger Woods is Tiger Woods because at his age he didn’t stop testing his limits. All great men, have been great because they set their benchmarks against themselves and not their peers. They all tried to test their limits of enduring physical, mental and emotional onslaught.

That’s what separates the good, from the GREAT.

I know I have made my choice to atleast try.