“When you THINK you are done, you are only 40% in what your body’s capable of doing. That’s just the limits of what we put on ourselves.” —DAVID GOGGINS
I’m certain that every one of us has had that point where we are on the verge of quitting on what we’re doing or what we’re working on. Usually it’s because we’re tired or we’re too scared to continue or we’re unsure if we will succeed because we’re afraid that our parents or relatives might scold us for not following what we’re told to do so. Sometimes, we stop and quit because we are unsure whether we would reach the epitome of happiness when we reach our goal.
Last December 2019, me and my family went on a trip to Osaka. For the most part of it, I went on to explore on my own to try the different types of food in the streets of Namba.
I was pretty confident in exploring the area because the city had a lot of free public Wi-Fi spots which made it easy to navigate the streets. After a few days in town, my relatives decided to go to Mount Inari — Fushimi Inari Taisha. If you’re looking for a place to hike without spending too much energy, the Fushimi-Inari hike is one of the best places to go to, in the hills around Kyoto. The peak of the hike is 233m and it usually takes 40 minutes to get to the top at a normal pace. It’s one of the most popular sites in Kyoto and that’s why it attracts a large amount of tourists.
We went there during winter, and I can say that there’s a fair amount of tourists and locals who went and hiked to the top. We arrived there at around 3:00 p.m., and my relatives wanted to leave early because they need to buy some groceries for dinner. They were yapping on and on about how it would take longer to reach the top, and that the 40min hike is not correct. Then I told my cousin that we can reach the top in 30 mins if we would walk faster than average. Surprisingly, my cousin was as excited as me to reach the top.
As we walk to the mountaintop faster than the others, we eventually got exhausted and our pace slowed down. We started our hike at around 3 p.m. and we’re still 20 mins away from the peak. I asked my cousin, “Do you still want to go up?”. He said: “Up to you”. He immediately saw the sign that says “10 mins to the view deck” then immediately said: “Let’s go, I mean the view deck is only 10 mins away.”. Truth is, the reason why I asked my cousin is because I was already exhausted and I wanted to head back down, but he insisted on going up. We got there, panting and sweating like we just ran a marathon. We were welcomed by a breath taking view (yes, pun intended) across all of southern Kyoto.
At this point, it says that the mountain top is 15 minutes away. Again I asked my cousin, “What do you think?”, “Up to you, we’re almost there”. In the back of my mind, I wanted to tell my cousin that we should go back because we’ll get scold at by our parents for not following the agreed time. I was getting really anxious at this point, but with him giving the choice of either going up or down made me think, “You’re here with someone who’s actually willing to get tired to reach the top. Don’t stop now.”
After almost a 45 minute hike, my legs started to burn and with air being thinner on the higher altitude of the mountain, I started feeling light-headed because of the lack of oxygen. My brain kept on telling me that I should do this, or I should do that. 10 minutes before we get to the top, I remembered a quote that says,
“How you do anything is how you do everything. Your ‘character’ or ‘nature’ just refers to how you handle all the day-to-day things in life, no matter how small”
— Derek Sivers
It’s funny how the brain would sometimes bring up a really awkward or embarrassing memory of you doing all sorts of weird things a few years back. Even though it happened a long time ago, it still makes you want to hide inside the closet — happened to me a lot of times too. But at this moment, I was astonished as to how my brain even brought that memory up. If how you do anything is how you do everything, could that mean that if I finish this “easy hike”, will I be able to build self-credibility that I can do anything as long as I put my mind to it? We managed to get to the top, my other cousin is already there resting after the long hike. We sat down, and admired the Kami-no-Yashiro Shrine.
Often times, we doubt our true potential because of how we do things based on how people told us to do it. It may be doing it the way they did it. Or even just telling your relatives that you’d meet them at this time. And when our brain notices that we won’t be able to do it like them or meet them at a specific time, it will automatically play an A.N.T. (Automatic Negative Response) which gives us the signal to immediately stop what we’re doing and just go back. That is because this is our brain’s way of protecting us from something that aren’t used to do — Fight, Flight, or Freeze.
But like what David Goggins said, “When you Think you are done, you are only 40% in what your body’s capable of doing. That’s just the limits of what we put on ourselves”. It doesn’t matter how you do it or how long it took for you to finish it, you just have to do it and push yourself. Because without it, we won’t be able to close the gap between what we can do, and what we can’t actually do.
