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FINDING MY ROGER BANNISTER
When I was a kid, maybe 9 or 10 years old, we had a big family reunion. There were a couple dozen of us around a huge table in a big, busy restaurant. It was a Saturday night, so the place was packed, with the waitstaff ping-ponging from table to table as quickly as they could.
A few minutes after we all gathered, our waitress came over to take our order. As you can imagine, this was a lengthy process. About halfway through, the waitress came around to ask me what I wanted to eat and drink. It was then that I realized that she hadn’t been writing down anything my relatives had ordered. I found this extremely curious. There was something like 25 of us, and I’d seen her serving other customers, so I knew we weren’t her only table. How was she possibly going to remember everything we’d ordered? I told her what I wanted and then watched her carefully as she made her way around the rest of the table.
I did not have a high level of confidence that my meal was going to remotely resemble what I’d requested. Even at that age, I had a healthy amount of skepticism. Not because I was a negative person or because I didn’t have faith in people, but rather that I needed to see anything out of the ordinary before I believed it was possible. In this case, I figured that, at best, the waitress would get most of our orders correct, but she’d wind up
putting them down in the wrong places, and we’d find ourselves trading plates all across the table.
Well, first our drinks came, and everyone got exactly what they wanted, even the cousin who wanted no ice in her Coke and another who’d requested that her drink come with a twist of lemon, a twist of lime, and two cherries. Okay, I thought, that was pretty good. But there’s a lot more to come. A few minutes later, the salads came out, and again everything was perfect. The people who wanted their dressing on the side got it that way, the people who wanted their dressing tossed with their salads got that, and everyone got the dressing they’d asked to get. My skepticism was being tested. And then the main courses were delivered. Not one mistake—and there were some crazy special requests. Everything was cooked the way we wanted, and all of the side dishes were the right ones.
I dove into my meal at that point, but I couldn’t stop thinking about what the waitress had accomplished. At this age, I’d only just begun to read competently, and my brain injury had caused me all kinds of learning challenges. And yet here was someone who had shown me that our brains are capable of far more than I would have imagined.
That waitress was my Roger Bannister. Bannister was a track star in the 1950s. In the early years of Bannister’s career, it was widely assumed that it was physically impossible for an athlete to run a mile in less than 4 minutes. The feeling was that our bodies would break down from the effort before the time could be achieved. Then, on May 6, 1954, Bannister ran a mile in 3 minutes and 59.4 seconds, proving that the 4-minute barrier was indeed breakable. What is most interesting to me is that less than two months later someone broke Bannister’s record, and then that record was broken, and then that one. The times have been dropping ever since.
What Bannister did was show that this barrier wasn’t in fact a barrier at all. That was what this waitress showed me. Through her, I saw that what I’d perceived my brain’s capacity to be was so much less than what it really was. As you know, I continued to struggle with learning for many years, but from the moment of that dinner I had a model for what was possible.
The waitress in this way was limitless. She demonstrated something in front of me that I would never in a million years have thought was possible. I never got to know her, but I’m forever grateful because what she did for me personally was to permanently change my perceptions of my own restrictions. She altered my mindset. It was impossible for me to buy into
the notion that I could expect to accomplish only a modest amount with my brain when I knew that others could achieve so much more. I just needed to find a method.
I’m going to share much of that method with you in this book. At its core is one fundamental concept: unlimiting. The key to making yourself limitless is unlearning false assumptions. So often, we don’t accomplish something because we’ve convinced ourselves that we can’t do it. Let’s go back to Roger Bannister for a moment. Every day before May 6, 1954, people were absolutely certain that a sub-four-minute mile was beyond the range of human capabilities. Forty-six days after Bannister did it, someone else beat his time, and more than 1,400 racers have followed them. Running a mile in less than four minutes is still an extraordinary feat—but it is not an impossible feat. Once that “barrier” was broken, many achieved it.
So, how do you face down limiting beliefs?
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