Are you sure there’s a barrier?

There’s a story behind that.

This is your daily message from Chad number 1233 to upgrade your mental game today by telling yourself a better story, because the most important story you hear is the story you tell yourself. This message is dedicated to Christina Lyon.

Here’s the upgrade:

You think your limits are facts, but upgraded thinking knows some limits expire.

Here’s the story:

Last week, in message 1228, I quoted Charles Darwin on overconfidence. Confident and wrong feel exactly the same from the inside. Today, Darwin gives us the mirror image and a clue as to where underconfidence comes from.

In 1877, Darwin described an observation by a German professor named Karl Möbius. A pike fish was kept in a tank with some minnows. A glass partition separated them.

The pike lunged. It smashed its snout into the glass. Again and again. For three whole months.

Then the glass came out. The minnows swam right in front of it. The pike did nothing. And Darwin wrote that “in a persistent and senseless manner he would not attack them.”

Here’s what gets me. The pike wasn’t wrong. For three months, the glass was real. The pike had data. Its map of the tank was accurate the day it was drawn.

It just never checked again.

On message 1188, we talked about the crabs in the bucket. That barrier is other people pulling you down. On message 591, we talked about the monkey with its fist in the jar. That barrier is your own grip. The pike’s barrier is neither. Nobody is pulling. Nothing is in its hand. The wall only exists in a story about the past.

So how do you get past a wall that isn’t there?

In the 1960s, psychologists Martin Seligman and Steven Maier studied dogs that had learned the same lesson. They had been given shocks they couldn’t stop. Later, in a box where one short jump over a low barrier would end the shock, most of them lay down and took it.

Threats didn’t move them. Rewards didn’t move them. Showing them the way didn’t move them.

What worked? The researchers put them on leashes and dragged them over the barrier. Over and over. Until the dogs started jumping on their own. And the recovery lasted.

Fifty years later, Maier and Seligman looked at the brain science and concluded they had it backward. Helplessness isn’t what gets learned. Giving up is the default. What you learn is control.

That’s good news. You’re not fixing a defect. You’re building a skill. And you build it the way the dogs did. One jump that works. Then another.

Sometimes you need someone to drag you over the first few times. That’s what coaches are for. That’s what friends are for.

The better story to tell yourself is, “That wall was real. I’m checking to see if it still is.”

Pick one thing you stopped trying years ago. Take one lunge at it today. The glass may already be gone.

Please like, comment, subscribe, or follow. Your engagement helps the algorithm and makes it easier for others to find these messages. Tell me a story of a wall that turned out to be gone to fromchadsmith@gmail.com. Send someone a text and ask them, “What’s something you quit trying that deserves one more shot?” You can get a free copy of my book, The Most Powerful Story in the World, by going to fromchad.gumroad.com. The transcript of this message and hundreds of others are always available at http://www.fromchad.com.