Olympic Records
When the Olympics come around, I always think about world records.
It seems like every year new records are broken. But every record has a brick-wall limitation somewhere. A point beyond which it’s physically impossible to do any better.
Every speed record approaches zero, but you can’t finish a race in zero seconds. You can’t lift a 10,000 lb weight. You can’t make 100 rotations in a half pipe spin.
Somewhere between the best marathon time and zero seconds is a limit that no human will ever be able to exceed. Future athletes will shave milliseconds off the records. They will continually challenge the notion that we’ve reached that limitation. We’ll never really know where that limit lives.
But it does live somewhere.
There are some natural limitations in creating, too. While practice, time, and hard work can help people accomplish incredible things, not everyone who picks up a guitar has the ability to someday become a super technical shredder (myself included). But unlike a stopwatch that goes in a linear direction toward zero, creativity has the benefit of being able to change course when you hit a wall. You can rethink. You can explore new areas of your mind. You can push yourself into new territory and try different tools.
When you’ve hit the brick wall in whatever race you’re running, you haven’t reached the end of your potential. All you have to do is take a turn and find a new race to run.
Or better yet, make your own race. Then you’re always the world record holder.
