You only know your real limit when your back is against the wall.

“If your life depended on it, would you do it?”

Andy Grove says that people don’t do things for 1 of 2 reasons: either a lack of motivation, or a lack of skills. The question above tells you which one it is.

However, I believe that if your life depended on it, and you had enough time, then you would attain such skills in an unfathomable pace.

Most people don’t achieve much in life. I attribute this mostly to the fact that they don’t want the ‘thing’ badly enough.

Their lives don’t depend on it, therefore it always takes the backseat.

“Burn the boats” is one of the most powerful examples to how you can use such analogy to your advantage. If your psyche thought your life depended on something, it will make you super human.

“The phrase originates from a historical event attributed to the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. In 1519, when Cortés landed in Mexico, he ordered his men to burn their ships, ensuring that there was no way for them to return home and compelling them to move forward and conquer the Aztec Empire.”

You are capable beyond measure.

Keeping room for you to retreat, however, makes you incapable of accomplishing hard things.

If it’s easy to give up, then, well, you will.

Our minds are preprogrammed from hundreds of thousands of years ago to protect us.

Your knee-jerk reaction to any form of danger is to retreat, as swiftly as possible.

When you run for a few minutes, your mind already starts signaling for you to stop.

You may feel like you’re dying. You feel awful. Pain creeps in.

But if you decide to ignore that feeling, then you can run for hours.

You’re not actually dying. Your mind is fooling you.

“When you want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe”

I heard this one in an ET motivational speech – it’s so powerful.

Stop breathing right now.

Count the seconds until you want to breathe.

Stay with that feeling for a bit.

Feel how badly you want it.

Imagine if you wanted to win/succeed that badly?

Man, you can move mountains.

There may be many reasons why you don’t want something badly enough.

You’re comfortable.

Your life is actually pretty okay.

Or maybe it’s too risky.

Or maybe you’re just a loser.

Oops. Did that touch a nerve?

Bingo. Use that anger to fuel you. Prove to yourself that you’re not.

Maybe you really don’t want to embarrass yourself.

Maybe you care too much what people think or say about you.

You’d rather avoid that, so you just don’t do the thing.

Eventually, if you want to avoid embarrassing yourself, not doing the thing becomes the best course of action.

But is this what you’re optimizing for?

Is the goal of not embarrassing yourself really worth losing out on everything else you want to attain?

But what happens if you actually embarrass yourself?

How bad can it be?

Eventually, you’ll still breathe. You’ll still live.

You’d probably still have a roof over your head. You probably would still have something to eat.

Your fear of embarrassment is holding you back.

My advice?

Toughen the fuck up.

Or accept to be a nobody forever.

Both are fine, no judgement. You can be a potato if that’s what you want to be.

But if you want to win, then put yourself in danger.

Take risk. Put yourself in a position where you may win, or you may lose.

Now do it again. And again. And again. And again…

Eventually, you will win.

And you will never be the same again.

Simulate having your back against the wall.

Burn the boats.

Act like your life depends on it.

I was lucky enough to be forced to be put into such position.

I was young and foolish, and I thought that if I don’t work hard, I will die.

I was threatened to be kicked out of the house at a young age because I wanted to drop out of college and work on my business.

My back was against the wall.

I could’ve given up, technically.

But I chose not to.

That decision changed my life, eventually.

I now realized that even when things got comfortable and cushiony, a life where something’s on the line is much more worthy than one that is comfortable.

“For believe me! — the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously!” – Nietzsche

Once you try it, you will get addicted, and life will never be the same again.

All you need to do is decide.