How can you know your limits?

Plus, doing the impossible 101

Hello my friend.

Since last time I sent the newsletter one day later, this time I’m sending it one day earlier.

Partly to make up for it, but the other part is because I have a timely announcement.

If you’re reading this between 10:30 AM and 12:30 PM PDT (1:30 - 3:30 PM EDT) I’m sharing a demo of a project I’ve worked on over the past 6 weeks. You can see how it turned out on this Twitter(X) post or this LinkedIn post. Pick the one you prefer. 😉

Alright.

With that said, let’s get back to the regular content.

Main quest 🛡

Do you know that Bob Marley quote that says…

You never know how strong you are, until being strong is your only choice.

In a similar way, I’d ask you

Do you know how much you can accomplish?

Maybe you can answer that straight away, maybe not.

A better question would be

How do we know the limits of our abilities?

Sometimes, the only way to know is when are forced to push those to the limits.

But not our “perceived” limits. More like actual limits.

When you start training in the gym, there are times when you feel you are already tired and can’t go anymore. But a good trainer knows that whenever you get there, you still have at least 20% more effort to put in.

The same thing goes for martial arts.

Your physical limit is beyond what you think it is. But you’d never know if it weren’t for a person or situation that makes you go there.

It’s like I’ve said before, there’s stuff we think it’s “impossible”, until it gets done.

Which was my experience again this past month.

If you’ve paid attention to the “experiments” of previous editions, I’ve worked on a project for an online program I got accepted to.

I started not even knowing what idea to work on.

From there:

• I chose what to work on.

• Started learning UX design and Figma.

• Made a first version of the website interface.

• Improved it further to a v2.

• Tried several design-to-code generators.

• Adapted the result into a new working project.

• Spent a ton of time choosing a tech stack.

• Found out I was building with technologies I didn’t know (so… much more learning to do).

• Struggled a lot getting the project working and the interface behaving properly

• And then posting about on the internet and submitting progress updates (despite falling behind the schedule).

I can for sure tell you I never thought I could’ve done all of that.

If you’ve told me at the beginning of the program that I would have to do all of that (plus going to bed or waking up at ungodly hours to make it happen) I would have called you crazy and most likely wouldn’t have started doing anything to begin with.

In a way, being somewhat naive and not having full knowledge about a situation/project/etc it’s an advantage. Otherwise your mind would talk you out of doing several things you’ve already done in the past.

But to face “impossible” you need a proper mindset (a growth mindset), enough emotional intelligence to not back down from something just before it starts producing results, and, of course, your learning skills in top shape.

Remember that you can only get into the flow state when the challenge is right above your current skills. Not too low to give you apathy or boredom, but not too high to give you anxiety or burnout.

This is true for all of us.

We’re more capable than we know. And we can push ourselves further than we think our limits are.

But if we’re pushing hard enough, we also need to rest & recover well enough.

And looks like that’s what I’ll be doing for the majority of the next week…

Experiments 🧪

This week’s been with what

Austin Kleon

talks about on his “Show Your Work” book.

It’s particularly difficult to share about what you’re working on when it’s in a “half done” state. But then again, most of us tend to wait until the last moment to show something when we think it’s “good enough”.

But by that point, we fail to share it in an effective way and no one cares…

So I’m trying out other approaches and posting on different parts of the internet than what I’m used to.

From the vault🏛️

With all the AI news this week, it seems the battle between proprietary and open source AI is tending towards open source becoming the winner.

But only time will tell what happens. (I’m rooting for open-source btw.)

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That’s it for this week!

Thanks for reading and extra thanks if you checked out any the posts I linked in my announcement above.

Take care and enjoy the rest of your weekend.

Cheers,

Juan.