The limits to your abilities

Limits to your abilities

“If you try hard enough you can achieve anything.” If you are a midget, two-foot-tall, you are extremely unlikely to beat the world high jump record. Not just unlikely, totally improbable. Someone could try for years on end with the best training, the best running shoes and with the finest diet coupled with the most perseverance imaginable. Yet no matter how hard they try they will never beat the fastest runners and highest jumpers on earth. Most will not even come close. You have in other words, defined limitations.

There are maximums to your abilities physical and mental. These limits are set out in your design. To reach the greatest potential you will need to be made right, right from conception. Those that reached their greatest potential came from mothers than ate well and didn’t get hampered by a polluted environment. The mental side of things counts as much as the physical. It takes a massive amount of practice, refinement, and doggedness to exploit your potential fully. The effort is the nurture, the design is the nature. It is all very well saying that someone could have got there if they tried harder, but they may have put everything they had into something and still fall short of expectations.

Your mind will be configured in a way that gives you excellence in certain thinking-based activities. It might appear to be more malleable than other physical constraints. However, your mental makeup has constraints regardless of its adaptability in the same way as you have a maximum stride length and limited running endurance. Certain drugs will of course enhance performance and increase the rate of improvement a bit. The boundaries of your design envelope can be pushed and stretched by artificial means. Some will go down this avenue despite the risk of a premature death. Realigning your potential in such a way doesn’t imbue upon your natural limits laid down in your personal design.

When we take something up like learning an instrument or engage in a sport, we make good progress at first. We work and work at it trying to get good at it. However, as time goes by, we find the increments of improvement becoming smaller and smaller. We find our limit. To get a tiny bit better we have to put ever increasing amounts of practice in for less and less reward. We reach our maximum potential in that field.

Finding yourself via trial and error is a long journey that begins with the understanding that your preferences can’t be changed, nor your affinities and there are limits to what you can achieve. It also means that you must get over any bad experiences that you may have along the way. The world changes but what we like does not. There may be people that you look up to and wish to beat or share the stage with, but sometimes, no amount of trying will see you get a chance of doing as well as them. Your affinities in the sexual sense are unchangeable. What you like is what you like.

“I still believe my preferences have changed over time.”

A hammer will do it. Smash yourself up, even inadvertently and then yes, a preference can be damaged. What about If you lost your sense of smell, what happens then? Some unfortunate souls have indeed lost this fabulous sense when they caught the flu and it never returned. Smell links with taste. Food no longer tastes of much and you are left with only texture to go by. How then can we still prefer strawberries over gooseberries?

A guillotine came down quickly, too quick for your reactions and you are without a hand. Prosthetics help. They are improving all the time, but it can alter what you want to do now, maybe spurring you on in a different direction with multiple upsides. The time wasted throwing javelins can now be spent on one handed golf. Actually, both are possible one handed. Consider the preferences you have been infused with as the central core. To access them you need your sensory inputs and the physicality of your body to garner its movement and hits it is subjected to. You are degrading daily. The more you degrade, the more confused you become in terms of your preferences. If you look at preferences deeply you see that they don’t change. A current preference is not the same as a core preference. You will be doing something because of convenience, fashion or to satisfy another objective. You will be doing it because it is nearer, cheaper or because certain people make it fun. Ideally you would prefer it if great people were doing the type of thing you like the best in a location not too far away.

When you emerged from the birth canal or were whipped out narrowly missed by the sharpest scalpel, you begun the process of discovery. The milk, warmth and being held tightly to the bosom of those cultivating you weighed far more than sexual activity you may have twenty years down the line. At that age you can hear a pin drop. Each year your hearing gets a little worse. You become deaf to high pitched sounds in your twenties. Your dexterity declines. There will be a time where you are at peak performance then every body function deteriorates. This impacts how you facilitate your preferences.

Preferences and physical ability may not align. You may be born with the capability to handle a flute with aplomb but detest every aspect of it. You may discover that you are quite good at something but still prefer doing something else. Preferences are both complex and quite straightforward. Sounds chime or grate with your molecules. Things resonate or jar. Some things evoke passion and joy as they chime, slot in, register with those inbuilt preferences allotted to you at conception. The keys that coincide with your lock. From that simple core it becomes a mush. Memories, experiences, exceptions, the weather, and who you are with, coming into play. If you are with your girlfriend, you prefer to do x. If you are alone, you prefer to do y. So many factors that interact with your desire to do things. It gets complicated quite quickly. Preferences are at the bottom. So much is stacked above that it makes them seem unclear. What you prefer to do on a rainy day will be different to when the sun is shining. That doesn’t change what you would prefer to do in an ideal world.