I recently had the chance to watch a documentary about a man named Ayrton Senna. He was a legendary Indy car racer from Brazil whose personality and charisma inspired a whole nation through his racing. Being Brazilian, he was often faced with political opposition within the racing community (most drivers were European and that’s where the money came from). He was cheated out of wins several times, either from “technicalities” that would disqualify him or even from other racers on his own team. He was known for his unique style of racing, which was more risky and “unkempt” than the racers of the time.
He had a true love and devotion for his craft. He would often refer to racing as a spiritual or religious experience for him. He even said that while racing, he would commune with God. To Senna, racing was not a job, but a passion. He was known to sort of “tune out” his surroundings during a race and go into a sort of flow, forgetting which laps he was on or his placement within the race.
One of the most inspiring things to me about his life was his disposition for excellence. He is known for saying:
“On a given day, a given circumstance, you think you have a limit. And you then go for this limit and you touch this limit, and you think, ‘Okay, this is the limit’. And so you touch this limit, something happens and you suddenly can go a little bit further. With your mind power, your determination, your instinct, and the experience as well, you can fly very high.”
I often find myself looking at my limits, restricting my dreams in the name of “practicality.” And while some limits cannot be changed (I’ll always be 5’7″), most can be broken. One example is the story of the 4 minute mile.
For years and years (pretty much since the Greeks started tracking how fast they could run until 1954), people thought that running a mile in less than 4 minutes was impossible. In fact, to most it wasn’t just impossible but unimaginable. As sure as the world was round (or flat, depending on who you asked), people couldn’t run that fast for that long.
This paradigm was accepted as a human limitation until Roger Bannister, an English runner, broke the 4 minute mile mark on May 6th, 1954. He ran a mile in 3 minutes and 59.4 seconds. While he only beat the 4-minute mark by microseconds, his accomplishment completely changed the world of athletics forever. Only 46 days later, Bannister’s milestone record was broken by his Australian rival, John Landy, who came in at 3 minutes and 57.9 seconds. Within 10 years, 3 more people had broken the record, and in 1999 Hicham El Guerrouj of Morocco ran a smoking 3:43!
Bannister’s accomplishment caused a tipping point that completely changed the world. It showed that people could, in fact, do it. It showed that limitations are only as real as we make them. The same is true not only of world records and athletics, but translates to our everyday lives. We all have limits that we impose on ourselves. Often, perhaps we fall short of excellence not because we enjoy mediocrity, but because we set our sights too low.
Today, I challenge myself and everyone else to aim a little higher. See where we have limited ourselves and make the choice to do what we think is impossible. Whether it’s our health plan (or lack thereof), our career capabilities, or our creative goals. Let’s not settle for less but instead PUSH OUR LIMITS AND AIM TO ACCOMPLISH THE IMPOSSIBLE.