Doing the impossible is easier than you think

Here's how I did the impossible.

I wanted to do 100 burpees in under 5 minutes. That’s 1 burpee (a pushup and squat jump) every 3 seconds. This is what doing it looked like in my head:

In other words: it looked difficult. Hard. Basically impossible. The first time I tried, it took me almost 12 minutes and I nearly died with my lungs on fire.

Over time, I pushed myself harder, got the time lower, and improved. In the span of weeks, I got it down to just under 7 minutes (still nearly dying of exhaustion every time). It seemed like I'm improving, and the difficulty went down:

But one thing remained clear: doing 100 burpees in 5 minutes was still super close to impossible.

This changed when I saw a video of someone doing it in 3 minutes and 33 seconds.

I thought 5 minutes was otherworldly and difficult. Then this guy did it in almost half the time! I was outraged!! 5 minutes was supposed to be hard, but this guy did even better!

So reluctantly my mind updated its estimate. If he could do it in 3:33, it couldn’t be that hard to do it in 5:00. Must be much easier than I thought:

The next day, I did what I thought was impossible: 100 burpees in 4:59.

Just because I watched a damn video.

Your beliefs determine the difficulty

Everything has a true difficulty (how hard it actually is for you). But you experience the difficulty based on your beliefs.

It’s personal (because something that might be trivial for you might be extremely hard for me). And of course, it changes over time as you improve (e.g. body adapting after exercising, so next time it’s easier).

For the burpees, the difficulty spectrum might have looked something like this:

So actually, it should've been easier than I thought. The green arrow was always there – while my expectations, the red arrow, moved around. But the difficulty I experienced was still as big as what I believed it to be:

That means I experienced more difficulty than was necessary!

To put it another way: Things are at least as hard as you think they are.

There's almost no upper limit to how hard something is for you, only a lower limit. The difficulty you experience is always at least the true difficulty, and after that only depends on your beliefs.

If you expect the difficulty to be higher, you’ll experience more of it.

The Magic Threshold Of Possibility

Of course there are cases where you expect the difficulty to be very high and then you “just do it” and it wasn’t as bad as you thought it would be.

I think this happens when the true difficulty and the expected difficulty are too far apart from each other. And once you try, you immediately realize that your expectation was wrong.

The problem is that the expectation can also be too high. This is when something seems so hard you don't even try. It's above your Magic Threshold of Possibility because it's too close to impossibility:

It's like the parable of the eagle hatching in a chicken's nest. It grows up believing it’s a chicken and that chicken can’t fly. So it comes to believe that it cannot fly either. It’s happy flapping its wings, but it never soars.

Don’t be that eagle!

How to update your difficulty

But then how do you change your expected difficulty?

The expected difficulty is a belief about yourself and the world. You use it to make predictions about the future and use those predictions to determine your actions. But the belief could be wrong, which would make your predictions and actions wrong.

Here are some ways to make those beliefs more accurate.

Studying and trying

By studying the problem and other people’s accomplishments (like watching the 3:33 burpees video), you can quickly update your beliefs if they differ too much from reality. What one person can do, another can do too.

Another way to change your belief is to just do it, to try and test it. If it shows that your belief is wrong, you’ve effectively changed it and reduced the expected difficulty.

This works both ways – if you expect something to be too easy, then learning about it and trying will bring you closer to its true difficulty.

Increasing the difficulty

Paradoxically, increasing the difficulty (e.g., choosing a harder goal) can decrease the difficulty of the thing you originally wanted to do.

If I update my goal from 5 minutes to 3:33, then 5 minutes feels like just another little milestone along the way. It's not as significant anymore. In my mind, what's really hard now is the new goal, and everything else is just a step along the way.

Introspection

You can challenge your belief about the difficulty by thinking from the opposite direction. Sometimes you don't even entertain the thought that your life could be... well, easier. So just ask:

What would this look like if it were easy?

...and see what you come up with.

Your beliefs shape your reality

The truly difficult thing to realize is how many things in life this applies to It's pretty obvious with goals you set for yourself. Because goals, almost by definition, are "attainable,” even if they seem difficult.

But what about all the things that you don’t even think about because you subconsciously dismiss them as “too impossible”? The problem is that those things aren’t visible to your conscious mind. Because as the lens through which you see the world, your beliefs filter them out.

What else are you secretly capable of, but too scared to attempt? Maybe the real limit isn’t your ability. It’s your beliefs.

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