Have you heard the fable of the old man who wished his creaky little house was quieter? He was advised to get a chicken, horse, and cow, and let them live inside his house for a week. It was insufferably chaotic for a week, but then after they left the house seemed silent in comparison. Expectations and perspective make a big difference.

I think many goals can be like that too. How many of us have been chasing the same goals for years? Not sure about you but I still muffin top pretty hard in the swimsuit I was supposed to fit into 7 years ago. I think we are capable of a lot more than we realize, but our methods, perspective and effort all depend on what our goal is.

What this means is that sometimes if you double or triple or 10x your goal, you’ll achieve drastically improved performance (even if you don’t hit the new sky-high goal). Personally, I was trying to get better at stress management. Little things gave me panic attacks, I overanalyzed what people thought about me, and had very little control over my anxiety. 

Then I did some traveling which took me way outside of my comfort zone for several weeks. Suddenly I didn’t have time to overanalyze. Everything was new, all the customs were different, and since every social interaction was awkward/difficult my anxiety acclimated to the new surroundings. I was still a bit nervous, but the goal of “survive in a foreign country” was much much harder than “look suave while ordering coffee in my hometown.”

Did I nail that 10x goal? Not really. But I made it back alive, and when I got back all the little anxieties I had before seemed so much smaller. I knew I could survive hard stuff, and it was much easier to notice and disengage from unhelpful anxious thoughts. Right now you don’t know what you can do. There’s things that require a level 10 skill and you assume it’s impossible for you or it’ll take you forever to get there. But if you attempt something that requires a level 30 skill and give it everything you have, you will rapidly adapt to level 10 performance out of necessity, perhaps even better. You can learn very very quickly when you have to, and then our old goals seem trivial in comparison.

I’m not saying exercise until you cripple yourself, but can you join a group where you’ll work harder to keep up with the others? Or reduce the timeline you had for a project by 75% and figure out how you might tackle it? Constraints make us more creative. When you only have time for the top priorities, you become efficient and focused. 

Does it matter if you achieve the 10x goal? Nope. But it’ll blow your mind to find out what firepower you truly have access to when you need it. New challenges teach new skills. If you’ve been in a rut for a while then mixing things up is the only way to break out of it. Don’t you want to know what you’re capable of?