The Big Leap

The Big Leap is about changing your overall perspective, so you can embrace a philosophy that’ll help you achieve your full potential in work, relationships, finance, and all other walks of life.

In the early 19th century, engineers figured out how to use steam engines to power wheels and thus, the steam locomotive was born. First used only to transport goods and resources, people quickly discovered it’d be a great means of transport as well. However, due to the state of science at the time, early adopters suggested to never run trains at more than 30 mph, for the human bodies on board would just explode.

Yes, you read that right. Folks genuinely believed their bodies would explode if they went faster than 30 mph. Luckily, some “madman” decided to go 31 anyway and here we are, driving cars that exceed 280 mph. What’s the lesson here? How much is possible is often limited only by how much we try.

A similar story is the one of Roger Bannister breaking the 4-minute mile. It was believed to be physically impossible before, but once he did it, others quickly followed. In the same vein, how often we’re happy and how long that happiness lasts doesn’t need to be defined by what we think is “normal.”

In The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt explained that we all have a biological happiness set point to which we tend to regress, but he too believes we can raise that baseline. Ask yourself: how much of your unhappiness comes from your belief that it “has to be there?”

So, why did I blow my relationship with the people who wanted to promote the heck out of me? I sabotaged myself. That’s it. Since we have this subconscious idea of how much happiness we deserve, we tend to ruin ourselves for no apparent reason, if things start going too well for us. Hendricks calls this an upper limit mindset, as a result of which we create fake drama and unnecessary problems. Often, we do this in another area of life, say, love, if you’re doing well financially. However, this is usually a sign of you letting your guard down and then making a careless mistake, rather than actually screwing up without meaning to. So if you’re on a winning streak, just make sure you keep your ego in check. Don’t get cocky and you’ll be fine. Another common upper limit is fear. There’s a long, famous quote by Marianne Williamson that our worst fear is not that of failure, but “that we are powerful beyond measure.” It makes sense. If you knew and accepted that you have all you need to live up to your potential, that…