Daniel Pink describes an ant trapped by a pen-drawn circle and a runner who stops at 10 km because the treadmill display says so. Both discover their limits were imaginary. When the circle tightens, the spider steps over it. When the display vanishes, the runner reaches 21 km. Most barriers we accept are just ink on paper.
Have you ever watched an ant trapped inside a circle it could simply walk out of? There's this video where someone draws a circle around an ant with a pen. The ant runs to the edge, believes it's trapped, and won't cross. Then they do it with a spider, and it's the same thing. But as the guy draws the circle tighter, the pen gets so close that the spider accidentally steps over it. From that moment, it can never be trapped again. It just runs off the page. Now, here's what's interesting about this phenomenon. It doesn't apply only to insects. It applies to us. It reminds me of this story I heard about this guy. He was speaking somewhere in Boston. He had a talk that afternoon, and he gets on a treadmill for his usual 10-kilometer run, except this treadmill had no distance display. So instead of watching the number, he just ran until his body told him to stop. And so he ran and he ran and he ran, and he never got the signal he'd always have at the 10-kilometer mark. He hit the button to check how long he'd been running. 21 kilometers. The circle was never real. He'd been stopping at 10 because his whole life he told himself that's where his limit was. The circles you've drawn around yourself, around what you're capable of, of what, what you deserve, about how far you can go. Most of them are just ink on paper.
