Confronting Limitations

A couple months ago I started taking exercise more seriously. I began with bodyweight training for its upper-body focus, especially since I had such disproportionally developed legs. To this day I still cannot do a single pull up, but I have noted a few takeaways from the experience of trying.

The most significant is that exercise is a confrontation between you and your physical limitations. And because they are physical, it is as if they manifest, present and absolute at that specific point in time. In this sense, progress is both a breakthrough of the old and an establishment of the new limit. A real physical reminder that I possess the ability to overcome.

I wanted to extend this sensation from the body to the mind, and sought cognitive exercises. I dabbled in poker, only to realize that I would have to actually gamble in order to fully experience the complexities of the game, and lost interest as quickly as I lost money. Then I stumbled upon chess.

Now I knew how to play chess from a young age, but never really tried studying it. I started with beginner lessons, basic tactics such as forks and pins. I started to build an intuition, recognizing patterns, calculating scenarios, all the mental gymnastics I could ever dream of.

Once I felt ready to play against real players, I queued up and got hilariously demolished the first five games. What a humbling experience. I analyzed my games to get to know what I didn’t know. Turns out I didn’t know a lot. And once I knew how much I didn’t know at the time, I started to realize how much stuff I didn’t know I didn’t know there could be. I soon figured out that this was exactly what I was looking for, and chess catered to that masochistic desire perfectly.

Chess forces you to appreciate losing. If you don’t, you won’t get better, and that means you’re just going to keep losing anyways. Chess is a one-on-one game between two minds, so losing also makes you feel really dumb, so you best enjoy that too. Honestly, I never thought of myself as the “mistakes are made so we can learn from them :)” guy because winning still definitely feels so much better than losing, but chess is really depleting those caveman instincts. OR I’m just saying this to convince myself it’s okay losing to 5 year-old Magnus Carlsen.

The point is, increasing the frequency of the times I come face-to-face with my limitations, both mental and physical, has had an overall positive effect. I am more inquisitive of my shortcomings and simultaneously more trusting of myself to improve. In other words, recognizing my limit makes me believe I can break those limits. In other other words, being aware of my limits is the first step towards breaking them.

There is a fear today that blames society to dilute our personal faults without even allowing us the chance to determine that ourselves. I believe we all deserve that chance, especially because our standards vary individually. But to be able to do so, we must not hang society’s drapes over our internal reflections and the limitations they reveal. Why should we let society dictate our potential, that who I am today is good enough for me? Just because it’s good enough for them? That’s just pure disrespect. Let my losses be my losses and my wins be my wins.